Abe Silberstein in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

In theory, a fundamentalist religious dictatorship should not be a hospitable environment for an extraordinary artistic flowering whose treasures continue—four decades later—to please, confound, and reinvent themselves to audiences around the world. Yet this seems to be exactly the case with Iran’s cinematic output since 1979, when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and his followers consolidated power in the wake of the Shah’s departure. (The Shah was himself a tyrant, but of the kind who sought to project a modern and art-friendly image.) We are all familiar with artists, writers, and filmmakers circumventing official and de facto censors to produce subversive masterpieces. But the consistency of Iranian cinema’s march across the world stage over the last 30-plus years suggests that something more powerful than individual creativity is at play—rather, a kind of relentless cultural force inexorably punching through whatever obstacles an authoritarian government places in its way.

More here.

Michael Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi, and Alex Gutentag in Public:

After years of official pronouncements to the contrary, significant new evidence has emerged that strengthens the case that the SARS-CoV-2 virus accidentally escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).

According to multiple U.S. government officials interviewed as part of a lengthy investigation by Public and Racket, the first people infected by the virus, “patients zero,” included Ben Hu, a researcher who led the WIV’s “gain-of-function” research on SARS-like coronaviruses, which increases the infectiousness of viruses.

More than three years after the pandemic’s outbreak, many around the world had given up on learning the origin of SARS-CoV-2, the highly infectious respiratory virus that has killed millions, and the response to which shut down businesses and schools, upended societies, and caused enormous collateral damage.

More here.

Jonathan B Losos in The Guardian:

Few people would mistake a wolf for a dog. But if you saw the ancestor of the domestic cat in your backyard, your first thought would likely be “What a cool-looking housecat!” rather than “What’s an African wildcat doing in Manchester?” That’s how little they’ve changed, earning them the tag “barely” or “semi-domesticated”. There have been some minor anatomical shifts – domestic cats have longer intestines and smaller brains, for example – but very few genetic ones (and certainly many fewer than separate dogs from their wild ancestors). What about behaviour, then? Which of the traits we commonly associate with our furry friends are the result of domestication, and which do they share with their wild relatives?

More here.

We All Gotta Eat

even ants go to war.
been thinking about it all summer, what it means…
i mean how human. or maybe how ant.
maybe nature begets violence because we all gotta eat.

yo i was on trains all weekend.
and lord, got sick on an empty stomach.
acid tides creeping up my throat.
but no, i didn’t eat the train food.

on the hill, in the college,
we poured gallons of slop into buckets for the pigs’ feast.
gross chunks, all fresh waste, an unholy stew…
and so much of it.

they’re looking at the port again.
Southside stays loud saying they don’t want it.
but y’know, folks can’t hear colored voices and well…
garbage needs a place to go.

every member of my family has mentioned my belly to me this year.
as if she doesn’t wake up with me every morning.
as if i don’t gaze at her lovingly in the mirror.
as if i should worry if she looks full…

call me callow, i just don’t think something living should go hungry…
not when we’ve made so much to eat,
with armageddon’s gas stove,
on a table we’ve slaughtered the world to build.

by Justice Ameer
from Split This Rock

Amanda Taub in The New York Times:

Did you watch the finale of “Succession” on HBO this week? If so, did the final shot of Tom and Shiv in their car make you think of “Bargaining With Patriarchy,” Deniz Kandiyoti’s 1988 article that is a classic feminist text?

Me too! And not just because “Bargaining With Patriarchy” would make an extremely literal three-word summary of the entire series. For while “Succession” was not overtly about the patriarchy, it is unquestionably about a patriarchy. “Succession,” for those unfamiliar, follows the exploits of the Roy family: literal patriarch Logan, an aging media baron in the mold of Rupert Murdoch, and his adult children. Most of the show’s plot was driven by his son Kendall’s various failed efforts to dethrone or succeed him, some of which roped in Kendall’s sister, Shiv, and/or his brother Roman. Which brings me to Kandiyoti, the feminist theorist whose groundbreaking work is surprisingly helpful for understanding today’s HBO hit.

More here.

Iris Kulbatski in The Scientist:

Scent is a powerful time portal, reviving long-forgotten memories in stark detail. The human brain begins to build a library of smells in infancy, which grows into adulthood. For people with hereditary hyperosmia—a rare, heightened ability to detect and discern scents—this smell repository can be vast and remarkably fine-tuned. Joy Milne, a retired nurse, patient advocate, researcher, and grandmother, discovered this superpower as a child.¹ Milne’s grandmother—also a super sniffer—trained her to identify scent signatures, as her own mother had taught her. As a nurse, Milne acquired an extensive clinical scent library, recognizing patterns between disease symptoms and diagnoses. After her late husband’s Parkinson’s disease (PD) diagnosis, she realized that the musky smell he wore at the nape of his neck for over a decade was an early warning sign and that she could detect it in other PD patients.

More here.

Kevin Power at The Dublin Review of Books:

6

‘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.’

 7

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.

8

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.”

more here.

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.

more here.

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.

More here.

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.”

More here.

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.

more here.

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