Amanda Petrusich at The New Yorker:

Since 1959—when she first appeared, at age eighteen, at the Newport Folk Festival, singing alongside the banjo player and guitarist Bob Gibson—Joan Baez has been electrifying eager crowds with her elegance and ferocity. Baez was central to both the folk revival and the civil-rights movement of the nineteen-sixties; her protest songs, delivered in a vivid, warbly soprano, felt both defiant and gently maternal. (Baez’s stunning 1963 performance of the century-old gospel song “We Shall Overcome,” at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, remains one of the crucial musical artifacts of the era.)

Now eighty-two, and with twenty-five studio albums behind her, Baez has mostly retired from music, though she is still making poignant and unpredictable art. This spring, Baez released “Am I Pretty When I Fly?,” a collection of line drawings that she created by working upside down and sometimes with her nondominant hand. The results are abstract, quivery, weird, inscrutable, pure, and hilarious.

more here.

Karen Wilkin at the Hudson Review:

Restless and, at some level, always dissatisfied, in the early 1960s, Guston began to step back from his acclaimed abstractions. The floating tangles of dense brushstrokes began to coalesce into dark, confrontational, ample ovals that hovered against murky webs like surrogate self-portraits, an association reinforced by titles like Mirror, Painter, and Head. A period devoted to essentially minimal drawing followed, as if Guston were stripping everything down to essentials, testing what a single assertive mark on paper could mean. Next, he concentrated on small “portraits” of shoes, books, light bulbs, hooded figures, window shades, and the like, with every image filling the available space and pressing toward us, a series that has been described as a visual lexicon, prepared for future works. Guston later said that he was provoked to make images by the events of 1968, including the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy, student uprisings, and police brutality during the Democratic Convention. He felt that worrying about color relationships and formal issues was inadequate to the situation.

more here.

Map

i.e., land turned napkin

i.e., the pen taking stock of what kings care to own

i.e., the Nile, the most dangerous and generous body of nature in the entire
continent, becomes the blue line asking permission from black lines
to keep flowing

i.e., even water is disaster here

i.e., how easily the man-made smudge off

i.e., when I asked my sister what shaped the right-side of Ethiopia like a
beak, she answered, “the crisis of Europeans”

i.e., the drawing of a line tends to be—if not the final—the origin of
catastrophes

i.e., it’s possible for a nation to lose its ears in a few months

i.e., red on paper, red on the fields

by Abigail Mengesha
from Frontier Poetry

Alissa Wilkinson in Vox:

“Originals,” of course, rarely are.

In 1989, a redheaded mermaid made her big-screen debut. She wanted to be part of the above-surface world, where people walk around on (what do you call ‘em?) feet, to wander free on the sand in the sunshine. She fell in love with a handsome, kind prince. After some terrifying obstacles and a near-miss, they married. Ariel got her feet.

For Disney, The Little Mermaid was a big hit, the start of a new era for the studio’s animated entertainment. She launched a hot streak that would continue through the 1990s: Beauty and the Beast (1991), Aladdin (1992), The Lion King (1994), Pocahontas (1995), The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996), Hercules (1997), Mulan (1998), and Tarzan (1999). They were hits then, the early films in particular, and form a foundational plank in billions of lives. A tremendous percentage of people walking around on the planet can sing snatches of “Part of Your World” or “A Whole New World” or “Circle of Life” at the drop of a hat.

More here.

Cade Metz in The New York Times:

When computer scientists at Microsoft started to experiment with a new artificial intelligence system last year, they asked it to solve a puzzle that should have required an intuitive understanding of the physical world. “Here we have a book, nine eggs, a laptop, a bottle and a nail,” they asked. “Please tell me how to stack them onto each other in a stable manner.” The researchers were startled by the ingenuity of the A.I. system’s answer. Put the eggs on the book, it said. Arrange the eggs in three rows with space between them. Make sure you don’t crack them. “Place the laptop on top of the eggs, with the screen facing down and the keyboard facing up,” it wrote. “The laptop will fit snugly within the boundaries of the book and the eggs, and its flat and rigid surface will provide a stable platform for the next layer.”

The clever suggestion made the researchers wonder whether they were witnessing a new kind of intelligence. In March, they published a 155-page research paper arguing that the system was a step toward artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I., which is shorthand for a machine that can do anything the human brain can do. The paper was published on an internet research repository. Microsoft, the first major tech company to release a paper making such a bold claim, stirred one of the tech world’s testiest debates: Is the industry building something akin to human intelligence? Or are some of the industry’s brightest minds letting their imaginations get the best of them?

“I started off being very skeptical — and that evolved into a sense of frustration, annoyance, maybe even fear,” Peter Lee, who leads research at Microsoft, said. “You think: Where the heck is this coming from?”

More here.

Edna Bonhomme at Public Books:

The first time I read Professor Laleh Khalili’s work, I was awed by her political acuity and ingenuity in laying bare contemporary colonial hierarchies. As I digested her work, I absorbed the magnitude precisely because her research methods were fresh in laying out how the Global South has become a laboratory for trade. Not only was Khalili an academic interviewing the formerly incarcerated, but she was also a reflective emissary on cargo ships, dissecting the logistics of trade. Khalili is not just a scholar; she forges community by showing reverence for feminist scholars and writers at all stages of life.

Professor Laleh Khalili, an engineer turned social scientist, has long been engaged in research that explores trade, policing, and petrol. She is an Iranian American and Professor of International Politics at Queen Mary University of London. When I spoke with Khalili, she said she was drawn to engaging with ports and landscapes, not purely from an economic perspective, but from a human perspective. And we, in turn, are drawn to Khalili and her ability to convey in detail the social forces that facilitate internment.

More here.

Francisco Toro in Persuasion:

It’s easy now to forget how shocking the moment was: just after 4pm on May 11th, 1997, Garry Kasparov resigned in the final game of his highly anticipated chess match against Deep Blue, an IBM supercomputer. A machine had beaten the human world chess champion in a competitive match for the first time. Commentators used to thinking of elite-level chess as a sort of irreducibly human area of excellence—the pinnacle of our species’ intellect—were forced into a moment of humility, reconsidering the topography at the outer limits of human and machine intelligence.

Today, we’re experiencing a new moment of AI vertigo. For months now, commentators have been coming face-to-face with the shocking capabilities of a new generation of AI engines like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and are walking away staggered, with a sickened certainty that something big is afoot, but only the haziest notion of where it might be leading. Historical parallels fail us, leaving us with a queasy sense that whatever might be about to hit us, we’re not ready.

Stepping into this haze to try to hazard a vision of the future is obviously fraught, but the moment of AI vertigo can’t last forever. As we acclimate to this weird new reality, we’re going to need mental models for what comes next. They won’t be perfect, of course. But they can cut through some of the fog, giving us at least a sense of what must change, and what won’t.

More here.

Alice Kemp-Habib in The Guardian:

Every day, upon leaving her Catholic high school, Agustina Bazterrica and her friends were followed by the same predatory man who would aim “the most terrible words” in their direction. A different man once masturbated in front of her on a packed train. “No one did anything,” she recalls. Coupled with the epidemic of violence against women in her native Argentina – where 212 femicides were reported in 2022 – these early experiences nurtured the feeling that “because you are a woman, anything can happen to you at any time”.

This sense of ever-present threat permeates the author’s new short story collection, 19 Claws and a Black Bird, translated by Sarah Moses, which serves up a smörgåsbord of assault, murder and suicide. It follows Bazterrica’s second novel, Tender Is the Flesh, set in a world where cannibalism has been legalised after a virus renders animal meat unfit for human consumption. That novel laid bare the violence in everyday experiences of womanhood through visceral, often shocking prose: for example, a female “head” (the euphemistic word for human livestock) has her vocal cords removed to prevent her from screaming.

Mariella Careaga in The Scientist:

Remembering what happened to us is more than just looking back to the past. The memories our brains store and later recall affect who we are, how we behave, and how we connect with others. Morgan Barense, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Toronto, believes in that.

As people age, it becomes harder to remember specific details of past experiences, and the loss of vividness in people’s memories significantly worsens their qualities of life (1). “When you start to lose your memory for the past, that can be really disorienting because you feel disconnected, not only from the things that you’ve done, but who you are as a person,” said Barense. In a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a group of researchers led by Barense showed that a mobile memory intervention they developed helped older adults preserve detail rich memories. They also provided evidence of the patterns of brain activity in the hippocampus associated with that memory enhancement (2).

More here.

Franz Lidz in The New York Times:

Aristotle called the hand the “tool of tools”; Kant, “the visible part of the brain.” The earliest works of art were handprints on the walls of caves. Throughout history hand gestures have symbolized the range of human experience: power, tenderness, creativity, conflict, even (bravo, Michelangelo) the touch of the divine. Without hands, civilization would be inconceivable. And so the discovery in 2011 of the bones of a dozen right hands, at a site where the ancient Egyptian city of Avaris (today known as Tell el-Dab’a) once stood, was particularly unsettling. The remains were unearthed, most with palms down, from three shallow pits near the throne room of a royal palace. The hands, along with numerous disarticulated fingers, were most likely buried during Egypt’s 15th dynasty, from 1640 B.C. to 1530 B.C. At the time, Egypt’s eastern Nile Delta was controlled by a dynasty called the Hyksos, which means “rulers of foreign countries.”

Although the Hyksos were described by the Ptolemaic Egyptian historian Manetho as “invaders of an obscure race” who conquered the region by force, recent research has shown that they descended from people who had immigrated peacefully over centuries from southwest Asia, now Israel and the Palestinian territories.

More here.

Writing in the Afterlife

I imagined the atmosphere would be clear,
shot with pristine light,
not this sulfurous haze,
the air ionized as before a thunderstorm.

Many have pictured a river here,
but no one mentioned all the boats,
their benches crowded with naked passengers,
each bent over a writing tablet.

I knew I would not always be a child
with a model train and a model tunnel,
and I knew I would not live forever,
jumping all day through the hoop of myself.

I had heard about the journey to the other side
and the clink of the final coin
in the leather purse of the man holding the oar,
but how could anyone have guessed

that as soon as we arrived
we would be asked to describe this place
and to include as much detail as possible —
not just the water, he insists,

rather the oily, fathomless, rat-happy water,
not simply the shackles, but the rusty,
iron, ankle-shredding shackles —
and that our next assignment would be

to jot down, off the tops of our heads,
our thoughts and feelings about being dead,
not really an assignment,
the man rotating the oar keeps telling us —

think of it more as an exercise, he groans,
think of writing as a process,
a never-ending, infernal process,
and now the boats have become jammed together,

bow against stern, stern locked to bow,
and not a thing is moving, only our diligent pens.

by Billy Collins

Alex Kitnick at Artforum:

THERE’S SOMETHING ABOUT VIDEO ART that calls for grand theories and epic summations, wild pronouncements and heroic declarations. It’s exciting to see a new technology appear in one’s lifetime and to feel some kind of ownership over it, to see it for what it is or, even more importantly, what it did—how it cut through the world. And since video is, or was, so closely related to television and what used to be called the mass media—it was either its intimate underbelly or a guerrilla weapon made to combat it—its value seemed to go unquestioned. The most important artists wrestled with it (Lynda Benglis, Dara Birnbaum, Nam June Paik, Ulysses Jenkins, Joan Jonas, Richard Serra, Robert Smithson); some of the best writers took it on (David Antin, Allan Kaprow, Rosalind Krauss, Anne Wagner). But when television went from a weekly calendar to a massive database that viewers could scan wherever, whenever, something changed; as video’s hardware flattened out and flooded the world, grafting itself onto automobiles and gas pumps—not to mention phones, bus stops, and airplanes—something gave way. (“In the mid-nineteen sixties people started moving television sets away from the wall,” Gregory Battcock wrote long ago. “The implications of this phenomenon . . . are enormous.”) It was as if every surface in the world had suddenly come throbbingly, pulsingly alive. Production also transformed. If the shift from film camera to Porta-Pak cut down on crew, the leap to phone and personal computer offered advanced editing techniques to almost any amateur—so video changed not only the world’s texture but also how we interact with it.

more here.

Justin E. H. Smith at Cabinet:

All that you touch / All that you see. The English graphic designer Storm Thorgerson, speaking of his career’s most iconic album cover, told the BBC in 2009: “Refracting light through a prism is a common feature in nature, as in a rainbow. I would like to claim it, but unfortunately it’s not mine!” In its title and in the color prism now eternally associated with it, The Dark Side of the Moon, Pink Floyd’s 1973 magnum opus, elides the distinction between two very distinct chapters in the history of science. One is Isaac Newton’s discovery, spelled out in the 1704 Opticks, that the prism does not so much produce color from light as it separates out the colors that are already in light. If refraction is a common occurrence in nature, nonetheless for 269 years, until Thorgerson’s appropriation of it, the image of the prism belonged to the Newtonian legacy. The other chapter, the history of that side of the earth’s sole natural satellite that, as a result of so-called “tidal locking,” remains in its orbit perpetually occluded from terrestrial view, is rather more difficult to trace back through all of its pre-Floydian instances.

more here.

Mara Naselli in The Believer:

In all her work, Biss scrutinizes the nature of our connection in American life. In one of her early essays, “Time and Distance Overcome,” she looks at how telephone poles, instruments of communication, became gallows in public lynchings across the country in the early twentieth century. Vaccines—our greatest collective defense against viral disease—become a symbol of violation and trespass. Money, our shared concrete metaphor of value, becomes a tool of exclusion. Each subject Biss examines exposes the contested ground on which we make and remake our American identities.

More here.

Charlie Wood in Quanta:

Forty years ago, Frank Wilczek was mulling over a bizarre type of particle that could live only in a flat universe. Had he put pen to paper and done the calculations, Wilczek would have found that these then-theoretical particles held an otherworldly memory of their past, one woven too thoroughly into the fabric of reality for any one disturbance to erase it.

However, seeing no reason that nature should allow such strange beasts to exist, the future Nobel prize-winning physicist chose not to follow his thought experiments to their most outlandish conclusions — despite the objections of his collaborator Anthony Zee, a renowned theoretical physicist at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

“I said, ‘Come on, Tony, people are going to make fun of us,’” said Wilczek, now a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Others weren’t so reluctant. Researchers have spent millions of dollars over the past three decades or so trying to capture and tame the particlelike objects, which go by the cryptic moniker of non-abelian anyons.

More here.

David Stromberg in The Hedgehog Review:

Bruno Schulz is an author who never tires of being discovered. A writer and artist whose known corpus includes two slim collections of stories, a bundle of letters, and a handful of visual works, mostly drawings. Schulz was born in 1892 in Drohobycz, a small Galician town that was then under Austro-Hungarian rule. He died in that same town in 1942, shot in the head by a Nazi officer. His life and work would likely have been unknown but for the efforts of a handful of people for whom his work meant the world.

Schulz was a master of the unrealized. He used language to give expression to the fancies of the mind. He wrote not about events but about the mental impressions of yearning, hoping, dreaming. He was rooted more firmly in the possible than the actualized. His words traveled on intellectual journeys of philosophical meandering. He brought his prose into the realm of the unfinished. This is part of what made him so attractive to readers in the post–World War II era. His imagination was an open field onto which others could project their own fanciful desire, nostalgia, and regret.

More here.