The Wretched of the Earth

I don’t like to start my day off with the dreadful news.
I feel fresh and enlivened in the mornings and refuse to taint
this short-lived joy with the hideous happenings   “out there.”

Instead, I turn to the artists, poets, and philosophers
—the true awakeners of the human spirit.

Black coffee, old books, and the music of Gustav Mahler
— the breakfast of champs.

Today, as the world continues to trudge along on its ruinous path,
I’m reading the essays of one of the most eloquent and profound
writers of the 20th century, James Baldwin.

He once reminded us:

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented
in the history of the world, but then you read. It was
books that taught me that the things that tormented me most
were the very things that connected me with all the people
who were alive, who had ever been alive.”

The New York Times once labeled Baldwin “the best essayist in this country
—a man whose power has always been in his reasoned, biting sarcasm;
his insistence on removing layer by layer the hardened skin with which
Americans shield themselves from their country.”

by Writer Unknown
from Poetic Outlaws

Robert Archambeau at The Hudson Review:

He constructed something else to go along with his literary life, too: he created a persona, what we might almost call a carapace. In an academic career that took him on what he called “many years of pilgrimage over the academic map,” from Smith to Bard to Rochester to Georgetown, he adopted the dress and mannerisms of an English gentleman, perhaps in response to what he called the “covert anti-semitism” in some of the departments in which he taught. Beginning his career at a time when creative writers were still viewed with some suspicion by their more conventionally trained colleagues, Hecht compensated by becoming what Yezzi calls “the very model of a modern literature professor: bearded, tweedy, pensive, reserved.” Hecht gravitated to teaching Shakespeare more than creative writing. While his love of Shakespeare was deep-seated, it was also an important part of this process of self-creation. “Nothing could be more canonical” than Shakespeare, Yezzi writes, nothing “more revered and accepted on both intellectual and aesthetic grounds.”

more here.

David A. Taylor at The American Scholar:

In winter 1940, beside a highway in the California desert, a reedy man bends down for a closer look at the road’s guardrail, where someone has scribbled graffiti: It’s January twenty-six. I’m freezing. Going home. I’m hungry and broke. I wish I was dead. But today I am a man … The onlooker feels a pang of recognition. He can hear these words in his head—the beginnings of another song.

That onlooker was Harry Partch, a musician and writer who balked at the strictures of Western music to become one of the most influential avant-garde composers of the 20th century. Few people today have ever heard of him—Partch seemed to position himself very far from folk hero, and he rarely gets mentioned in the same breath as his contemporaries Woody Guthrie or Huddy Ledbetter, better known as Leadbelly, who drew on deep folk traditions for their music. By contrast, Partch has long had the reputation of an iconoclast and a wanderer. His compositions are written for instruments he built and in complex scales of his own devising, thrumming like wild, futurist gamelan performances.

more here.

Elise Cutts in Quanta Magazine:

Luca Giomi still remembers the time when, as a young graduate student, he watched two videos of droplets streaming from an inkjet printer. The videos were practically identical — except one wasn’t a video at all. It was a simulation. “I was absolutely mind-blown,” said Giomi, a biophysicist at Leiden University. “You could predict everything about the ink droplets.”

The simulation was powered by the mathematical laws of fluid dynamics, which describes how gases and liquids behave. And now, years after admiring those ink droplets, Giomi still wonders how he might achieve that level of precision for systems that are a bit more complicated than ink droplets. “My dream is really to use this much predictive power in the service of biophysics,” he said.

Giomi and his colleagues just took an important step toward that goal. In a study published in Nature Physics, they conclude that sheets of epithelial tissue, which make up skin and sheathe internal organs, act like liquid crystals — materials that are ordered like solids but flow like liquids. To make that connection, the team demonstrated that two distinct symmetries coexist in epithelial tissue. These different symmetries, which determine how liquid crystals respond to physical forces, simply appear at different scales.

More here.

Dylan Scott in Vox:

Of all the culprits that make it harder for Americans to afford and access health care, the sheer confusion many patients experience when trying to select an insurance plan or when faced with an expensive medical bill may be the most overlooked. That’s according to a recent survey from research firm Perry Undem, which reveals the deep confusion Americans feel when receiving health care — confusion that could put them on the hook for higher costs.

US health care costs are dire enough as-is, and it’s easy to look at the data on US prices for common procedures compared to the prices in other countries, or to compare the out-of-pocket costs Americans typically must pay for medical services under their insurance plan compared to their peers elsewhere and see the issue. It’s the prices, stupid, as some of the country’s leading health care economists once described the problem. And the prices are indeed a big part of the US health system’s shortcomings: Research has shown that people will skip necessary care if they have even a small cost to pay, and recent surveys find one in three Americans say they have postponed medical treatment in the last year due to the cost.

More here.

Nina Power in Compact:

For someone working in the culture industries, the only thing worse than having the wrong position on a political controversy is having no position at all. Today’s artists are the high priests of the secular middle classes, with cathedrals (art galleries) in every major city. In recent years, rather than defend free expression and the exploration of beauty, the passé concerns of previous centuries, the art world has become the moral directorate of the social order. Malevich’s 1915 “Black Square” became 2020’s Instagram BLM square—and woe betide anyone who failed to correctly perform the ritual. As Guy Debord put it in his 1988 “Comments on the Society of the Spectacle,” “since art is dead, it has evidently become extremely easy to disguise police as artists.”

The growing tendency of artists to pronounce on everything from microaggressions to macropolitics shows that we need a fundamentally different understanding of the role played by artists and their institutions.

More here.

Oliver Burkeman in The Guardian:

Into this bewildering terrain [the philosophical issue of free will] steps the celebrated behavioural scientist Robert Sapolsky, who sets out in Determined to banish free will once and for all – and to show that confronting its nonexistence needn’t condemn us to amorality or despair. It’s only one aspect of the book’s strangeness that he does this in a style that often calls to mind a hugely knowledgable yet stoned west coast slacker. (I’m still recovering from his reaction, in a book crammed with footnotes and diagrams of motor neurons, to the conclusion that we don’t control our lives: “Fuck. That really blows.”)

His strategy is an ambitious one: to track every link of the causal chain that culminates in human behaviour, starting with what’s happening in the brain in the final few milliseconds before we act, all the way back to how our brains are shaped by early experiences, and even before that, all mostly at the fine-grained level of neurotransmitters and genes.

More here.

Kenan Malik in The Guardian:

Watching the tragedy unfold in Israel and Palestine has sometimes felt like reading the Oresteia backwards. A trilogy of plays by Aeschylus, written in the fifth century BC, the Oresteia tells of the transformation of ancient Greece from a society rooted in blood and revenge into one shaped by justice.

The Oresteia begins with the return home from the Trojan war of Agamemnon, the leader of the triumphant Greeks. He is brutally murdered by his wife, Clytemnestra, in furious revenge for his having ritually sacrificed their daughter Iphigenia on the eve of conflict to placate the gods.

To avenge his father, Agamemnon’s son, Orestes, kills Clytemnestra. Pursued by the Furies, ancient deities whose role is to exact vengeance for major sins, he seeks refuge in Athens. The goddess of wisdom, Athena, convenes a jury to try Orestes. With the jury split, Athena votes in favour of acquittal, and in so doing opens up the possibilities of a world beyond that governed by the Furies.

The Oresteia is a complex work engaging in issues from patriarchy to democracy. The human condition, for Aeschylus, was tragic, with Agamemnon, Clytemnestra and Orestes all facing impossible choices. Part of the process by which humans civilise themselves and learn to live with the tragedy of their condition is, he suggests, in forging the distinction between vengeance and justice. Justice brings us into the sphere of politics and allows for the possibility of reasoned change and redemption.

More here.

Aya Labanieh at the LARB:

If you’ve spent time on the internet, you’ve undoubtedly heard of “No Nut November” (NNN)—an annual Reddit-based challenge that dares young men to abstain from ejaculating (or “nutting”) for the full 30 days of the month. While NNN has gone viral as a tongue-in-cheek meme in its own right since 2017, its anti-ejaculatory ethos can be traced to the online “NoFap” community, whose adherents—almost entirely cisgender, heterosexual men—tout its near-magical self-help benefits. There, abstaining from masturbation is presented as a tool not only for quitting addictions to pornography but also for curing depression, finding a girlfriend, succeeding in one’s career, and generally regaining confidence, autonomy, and masculine power.

The movement was founded in 2011 by web developer Alexander Rhodes, who was inspired by a 2003 study claiming that men who did not masturbate for seven days experienced a 145.7 percent spike in testosterone levels.

more here.

Suleika Dawson at Literary Review:

Adam Sisman presents this new book on John le Carré as a ‘secret annexe’ to his earlier biography of the author. Its subject is the women in le Carré’s life – the ones the novelist didn’t marry, that is, but to whom he repeatedly offered the secret parts of himself, which the ones he did marry almost never got to see. It’s only a slim volume, but, as we are so often told, size doesn’t matter if a fellow knows what he is doing. As one of le Carré’s women myself, I feel in a position to take a view.

The reason why Sisman had to keep his annexe secret is that le Carré (real name David Cornwell), whom Sisman initially believed had given him a free hand to write a ‘warts and all’ biography, ultimately forbade him from including details of these previously hidden affairs. Given that equally able writers – Robert Harris, Graham Lord, Jeffrey Meyers and others – had previously fallen at this Becher’s Brook of biography, variously deterred and outmanoeuvred by the ever wily and always wary novelist, Sisman should perhaps have seen the volte-face coming.

more here.

Bim Adewumni in The Guardian:

Before the pandemic, Roxane Gay was constantly on the road. When the lockdowns of early 2020 came into effect, she realised something startling. “That was the longest I had been in one place since 2014.”

She and her now wife, the writer and designer Debbie Millman, had just decided to live together between LA and New York when the pandemic hit. But Gay’s mother has stage 4 lung cancer, and “you know, lung cancer and Covid don’t go well together”, Gay says. So they formed a pod, or bubble. “I was like, ‘I’m not going a year without seeing my parents when we don’t know how much longer she has.’ But she’s a marvel. Turns out she’s got a lot more time.” Her smile as she says this is sweet, almost private. “It was great to be able to keep our eyes on them. It was fun to hang out. I like my parents. They’re just funny. And they’re amazing people to live with as adults.”

Meanwhile, amid the horror of a global catastrophe, Gay and Millman eked out quality time together. They got a puppy, played badminton and went on neighbourhood bike rides. Later that summer, Gay revealed the pair had eloped. “I didn’t get much writing done, but I did enjoy the step back,” she says.

More here.

Zero Gravity

You leave Earth looking for perspective.
How you long to see it, the blue marble,

from outer space. The overview
changes everything astronauts say

and you are looking for change,
to not take life so seriously. So much

energy required to get off the planet to
break with gravity, the bond with Earth,

the ship violent with propulsion’s inferno
shaking you loose from the known world.

But maybe your friend is right, maybe Earth’s best
hope is mass conversions to religions that

teach reincarnation, then people might care
about the future of the planet? You unbuckle,

let yourself float free, wanting the thrill
before this once-in-a-lifetime trip ends,

even a few minutes of giddy weightlessness
so close to death, a tangible peril right

outside the window, Earth passing there
below you now, alone in the darkness.

by Sally Ashton
from The Ecotheo Review

McKenzie Prillaman in Nature:

Desaire and her colleagues first described their ChatGPT detector in June, when they applied it to Perspective articles from the journal Science². Using machine learning, the detector examines 20 features of writing style, including variation in sentence lengths, and the frequency of certain words and punctuation marks, to determine whether an academic scientist or ChatGPT wrote a piece of text. The findings show that “you could use a small set of features to get a high level of accuracy”, Desaire says.

In the latest study, the detector was trained on the introductory sections of papers from ten chemistry journals published by the American Chemical Society (ACS). The team chose the introduction because this section of a paper is fairly easy for ChatGPT to write if it has access to background literature, Desaire says. The researchers trained their tool on 100 published introductions to serve as human-written text, and then asked ChatGPT-3.5 to write 200 introductions in ACS journal style. For 100 of these, the tool was provided with the papers’ titles, and for the other 100, it was given their abstracts.

When tested on introductions written by people and those generated by AI from the same journals, the tool identified ChatGPT-3.5-written sections based on titles with 100% accuracy.

More here.

Ann C. Thresher at IAI News:

There is an outdated idea that science and art are polar opposites. That science, associated with the left brain hemisphere, is logical, structured, whereas art, the domain of the right hemisphere is soft, intuitive, creative, guided by practiced judgement and innate skill. Of course, any neuro-scientist will tell you that the distinction between “right and left brain thinking” is a myth, that both sides are equally important in thinking through a math problem and painting a picture.

Similarly, it is time to give up the myth that science and art are fundamentally different. Good science is an art-form, and scientists draw on highly trained, creative intuition and judgements, just as much as artists do. Scientists rely on the sort of soft skills we usually exclusively attribute to artists throughout their work, from conceptualising research projects, to designing experiments, to interpreting and presenting data, to conceiving of new theories and models. Science isn’t an exact science, in the sense that there is no one formula or methodology or approach that scientists just follow.  Science is a practice,  not unlike art – a messy mosaic of judgements and creativity, aiming to capture a complex external world that almost always defies simple description or measure.

More here.

Liad Mudrik in Nature:

These are good times to be a thinking, conscious creature, despite events in the world that might make us doubt that. These are even better times to be a creature who thinks about consciousness: the scientific debate is livelier than ever, and technological advances and political controversies are making the practical and philosophical questions surrounding consciousness ever more pressing. Will artificial intelligence (AI) become conscious? (Or maybe it already is…? Well, no, I would say, but we’ll get to that later.) Can state-of-the-art algorithms manipulate our consciousness to change our view of the world? Which animals, besides humans, are conscious? What about fetuses? Or artificial neural organoids?

It is becoming clearer that real-life implications will be drawn from the answers that this field generates to such questions. That means we must vastly improve our fundamental understanding of consciousness and related phenomena, such as agency, free will and sense of self. With so much at stake, we had better get things right. This sense of gravity hovers above three books that, in one way or another, tackle these thorny questions.

More here.

Sean Carroll at Preposterous Universe:

A “Theory of Everything” is physicists’ somewhat tongue-in-cheek phrase for a hypothetical model of all the fundamental physical interactions. Of course, even if we had such a theory, it would tell us nothing new about higher-level emergent phenomena, all the way up to human behavior and society. Can we even imagine a “Theory of Everyone,” providing basic organizing principles for society? Michael Muthukrishna believes we can, and indeed that we can see the outlines of such a theory emerging, based on the relationships of people to each other and to the physical resources available.

More here.