James Gallagher in BBC:

Be Bored

For the sake of cleansing seconds
stare at something still.
Free from feeling filled
hum the sound of the sun descending
sitting in its final ribbons.
Watch what leaves shake
in the unseen breeze.
Feel your own fingers.

Let time be soil for time.
Let hunger set in

by Sean Kerney
from Press Magazine, Fall 2014

Karl Vick in Time:

Salman Rushdie is back at his desk, savoring the acclaim for his most recent work and bending to the next—his account of the attack that nearly killed him last summer on a stage in Chautauqua, N.Y.

“If it’s a book, it’s not going to be a particularly long book,” he tells TIME. “Might be a couple hundred pages, so I’m hoping that I could do it in a year or so. But I’m not beating myself up about it. I’m just getting it right.”

Rushdie, who was stabbed more than 10 times, describes his recovery from the Aug. 12, 2022 attack with the kind of measured care that has kept him in the land of the living. “Slowly does it,” he says. A tinted lens hides his right eye, which no longer sees. “The knife went quite deep in. The knife went as far as the optic nerve.” He also lost the use, for a time, of his left hand, but that’s coming back. His longtime therapist has helped with “nightmares, and that sort of thing,” he says.

More here.  [Includes a short video.]

Yoshua Bengio at his own website:

There is no guarantee that someone in the foreseeable future won’t develop dangerous autonomous AI systems with behaviors that deviate from human goals and values. The short and medium term risks –manipulation of public opinion for political purposes, especially through disinformation– are easy to predict, unlike the longer term risks –AI systems that are harmful despite the programmers’ objectives,– and I think it is important to study both.

With the arrival of ChatGPT, we have witnessed a shift in the attitudes of companies, for whom the challenge of commercial competition has increased tenfold. There is a real risk that they will rush into developing these giant AI systems, leaving behind good habits of transparency and open science they have developed over the past decade of AI research.

There is an urgent need to regulate these systems by aiming for more transparency and oversight of AI systems to protect society. I believe, as many do, that the risks and uncertainty have reached such a level that it requires an acceleration also in the development of our governance mechanisms.

More here.

Hummingbird

One day in a lifetime
I saw one with wings
a pipesmoke blur
shaped like half a kiss
and its raspberry-stone
heart winked fast
in a thumbnail of a breast.

In that blink it
was around a briar
and out of sight, but
I caught a flash
of its brain
where flowers swing
udders of sweet cider;
and we pass as thunderclouds or,
dangers like death, earthquake, and war,
ignored because it’s no use worrying ….

By him I mean. Responsibility
Against the threat of termination
by war or other things
is given us as by a deity.

by Milton Acorn
from:  Dig Up My Heart: Selected Poems 1952-83
McClelland and Stewart, Toronto, 1983. p.62.

Curtis White in Lapham’s Quarterly:

This issue of Lapham’s Quarterly bravely addresses the hotly contested word freedom. It is hotly contested in part because what the word means has never been clear, a fact that has not seemed to lessen its importance for us. It is a word in which we have invested enormous amounts of energy without producing much in the way of illumination. And yet freedom cannot be dismissed simply on semantic grounds—“just another word,” as Kris Kristofferson sang—because what is at its heart may very well answer the question “What does it mean to be human?”

In our own moment, progressive activists resist what they see as the opposite of freedom: slavery. Modern slavery takes the forms of work and debt, of legislation limiting a woman’s authority over her own body, of racist segregation, and of the prison-industrial complex, to name but a few examples. Our world is not so different from the one described by 
Belinda, a woman enslaved for fifty years in eighteenth-century Massachusetts, where “lawless domination sits enthroned, pouring bloody outrage and cruelty on all who dare to be free.”

The voice of economic privilege uses the idea of freedom in order to claim the right to deploy property to its own rich advantage. Making matters worse, others on the political right have weaponized freedom to advance a long list of grievances about what they believe has been wrongly taken from them. Some of these grievances are legitimate; neoliberalism has indeed denied many people the work that once gave them economic independence and a sense of self-worth. But that legitimate complaint has gotten tangled with terrible things, especially the perception of those on the right talking freedom that they have been “replaced” by racial minorities, liberated women, and the LGBTQ community. So they set out to “own the libs” and reclaim their lost freedoms through the public display of their resentments (aka rioting), with guns on their hips if they so choose (and they usually do). This is freedom as understood in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four: “War is peace. Slavery is freedom. Ignorance is strength.”

More here.

Rachael Gorman in The Scientist:

Skin shields our bodies from the world’s dangers, but sometimes, with a nick or a bump, that barrier is breached. That’s when pain- and itch-sensing nociceptor neurons jump to action, transmitting threat signals to the central nervous system, while dendritic cells eliminate pathogens by secreting cytokines and coordinating local inflammation, while also playing a role in adaptive immunity.

But this work is not done in isolation: Dendritic cells (DCs) and nociceptors are entangled in a powerful partnership, and a new study published March 31 in Science describes three unique ways these intertwined cells communicate to fine-tune the fight against invaders.

Back in the early 2010s, clinicians observed that people with the autoimmune inflammatory skin condition psoriasis who also happen to have nerve damage don’t suffer from the condition’s hallmark skin lesions in the injured area. When the nerve heals, however, the lesions return. Lorena Riol-Blanco and Ulrich von Andrian, immunology researchers at Harvard University, were intrigued, and in 2014, their team discovered for the first time that DCs interact with nociceptors. They found that this relationship is necessary for an inflammatory response: DCs sit on nociceptor axons and require a signal from them to make the cytokine interleukin (IL)-23, which is the master driver of psoriasis skin inflammation. The precise nature of this relationship, however, eluded them. “We didn’t know what’s the language that’s being spoken there,” von Andrian tells The Scientist. Answering “the question ’How exactly does it actually work?’ was a five-year process.”

More here.

Joe Zadeh at Noema:

Most of humanity now lives in cities made possible by concrete. The majority of buildings, from skyscrapers to social housing, are made of concrete or contain large amounts of it. Even buildings made from steel, stone, brick or timber are almost always resting on concrete foundations and are sometimes masking an unseen concrete frame. Inside, concrete is ceilings and floors. Outside, it is bridges and sidewalks, piers and parking lots, roads and tunnels and airport landing strips and subway systems. It is water pipes, sewers and storm drains. It is electricity: dams and power plants and the foundations of wind turbines. Concrete is the wall between Israel and Palestine and the Berlin Wall and most other walls. It is “almost anything,” wrote the architect Sarah Nichols in an essay this year, “almost anywhere.”

Concrete is modern, yet ancient. There’s a sense in which it was born in the bowels of volcanoes, formulated by the eruptions of the Earth.

more here.

Lawrence Weschler at Wondercabinet:

Nowadays the title reads not only as tepid and banal but as distinctly unrepresentative of the ensuing narrative’s principal themes and contours. In fairness, when the onetime Austro-Hungarian actress and subsequently Hollywood scenarist Salka Viertel first began auditioning the phrase “the kindness of strangers” for the title of her memoir in progress, back in the mid-1950s, as her recent biographer Donna Rifkind has pointed out, the words were not nearly as hackneyed as they are today. (The sensational play A Streetcar Named Desire, from which they sprang, was only a few years old, having premiered in 1947; the film had only been released in 1951; and the primary chestnut to have emerged from the latter was Stanley’s bloodcurdling scream of “Stella! Stellllaaaa!” and not so much Blanche’s breathy Southern belle protestations of having always reliii-ed on the kindness of strangers.) Salka’s husband, the internationally acclaimed theater director Berthold Viertel, had been translating their friend Tennessee Williams’s plays for some years already and staging them all over Europe, and perhaps Salka savored the nod in the young playwright’s direction. Such selfless generosity, indeed such kindness on her own part, would have been just like her.

more here.

David Gauvey Herbert in New York Magazine:

Walter was tall and gaunt with a hard-to-place, vaguely English accent. He favored Kools and Chardonnay, and he was never photographed in anything but a dark suit, a tiny smile often curling at the corner of his mouth. His public profile was about to explode. A publisher was finalizing a book about the Vidocq Society, The Murder Room, which detailed Walter’s casework on four continents and claimed that at Scotland Yard he was known as “the living Sherlock Holmes.”

More here.

Sarah Rose Sharp at Hyperallergic:

Nothing really prepares one for the experience of entering the Huckleberry Explorer’s Club (HEC), a small museum in a duplex in Detroit’s burgeoning Core City neighborhood whose ground floor houses a general store full of secondhand oddities for sale at throwaway prices…. One of the items on display is a wedding ring that Golberg discovered inside a desk she found on a street in Brooklyn. An inscription on the ring reads, “Steven and Julie” with the date February 12, 1988.

“I just felt so moved by this object, thinking through all of the different possible scenarios as to how that ring got to be inside the desk; it felt like this object had so much aura around it,” Golberg said. “More and more as I started, these sorts of things came into my life, and it wasn’t just about the things themselves or the picture [she took], but the relationship between two of us. It was kind of like I was marrying this moment.”

Golberg began marking her objects with little tags that offer context, dates, or adjacent experiences.

more here.

Charlotte Higgins in The Guardian:

Last August, the author Deborah Levy began to sit for her portrait. The starting point was a selfie – eyes penetrating, lips sensuous, head topped by a tower of chestnut hair. The artist, her friend Paul Heber-Percy, used Photoshop, then a pencil and tracing paper, to reverse and multiply the image of her face, until he had a drawing, neatly laid out on a grid, that satisfied him.

Then it was time to paint. He liked to work in the mornings, in hour-long bursts, in his tiny attic studio. When Levy came for sittings, he’d bring the painting down to the dining room, and the two of them would drink tea or wine, and talk. Not that these were sittings in the traditional sense, but “times I could observe her without feeling self-conscious”, he said.

Sometimes they’d discuss Levy’s new novel, August Blue, which she was finishing; but mostly it was “everyday things – friends, the news, exchanging recipes, how to unblock a sink”, said Levy. But, Heber-Percy told me, nothing about these conversations was really everyday. She is the sort of person who makes the mundane remarkable.

More here.

Adam Mastroianni at Experimental History:

For the last 60 years or so, science has been running an experiment on itself. The experimental design wasn’t great; there was no randomization and no control group. Nobody was in charge, exactly, and nobody was really taking consistent measurements. And yet it was the most massive experiment ever run, and it included every scientist on Earth.

Most of those folks didn’t even realize they were in an experiment. Many of them, including me, weren’t born when the experiment started. If we had noticed what was going on, maybe we would have demanded a basic level of scientific rigor. Maybe nobody objected because the hypothesis seemed so obviously true: science will be better off if we have someone check every paper and reject the ones that don’t pass muster. They called it “peer review.”

This was a massive change. From antiquity to modernity, scientists wrote letters and circulated monographs, and the main barriers stopping them from communicating their findings were the cost of paper, postage, or a printing press, or on rare occasions, the cost of a visit from the Catholic Church.

More here.  And this post now has a followup here.

Joshua Leifer in the New York Review of Books:

Many opponents of Netanyahu’s judicial overhaul have called for Israel to finally draft a constitution, but any serious attempt will mean choosing between a democratic state and one that privileges Jewish citizens above all others.

On March 26 Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, announced that he was firing his defense minister, Yoav Gallant. The previous day, Gallant, a former navy commando, had demanded that Netanyahu halt the government’s plan to overhaul the country’s judiciary—a plan that threatens to dismantle as much as reshape it. The proposal, unveiled by the justice minister, Yariv Levin, in early January, would give the governing coalition control over the appointment of judges, limit the Supreme Court’s ability to annul legislation through judicial review, and enable Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, to override decisions made by the court. Levin committed to passing each plank of the plan as a bill of its own in quick succession.

Since January opponents of Levin’s proposal to subordinate the judiciary to the Knesset have held demonstrations around the country every Saturday night.

More here.

Heather Clark at Poetry Magazine:

“She had no sympathy,” Spiegelman tells us, “for people who paraded their inner misfortunes.” Clampitt’s dismissive attitude toward the self-indulgences of confessional verse, which commanded so much attention in the 1960s and 1970s, was a product, he writes, of “her stern midwestern upbringing.” And her models: Hopkins, Keats, Wordsworth, Dickinson, Millay, Swinburne. Clampitt returned to their lives again and again in her work, and their echoes sound in “The Kingfisher.” But T.S. Eliot also haunts the poem: memory and desire, European landscapes, breakdown, and even the nightingale recall The Waste Land. Clampitt knew it all. In 1956, she told her brother Philip that she could write a history of English literature from memory “and know just where to place everybody in it, with hardly any trouble at all. The reason being, apparently, that I feel I am in it.” Spiegelman notes the boldness of this claim, especially for a woman writer who did not publish her first poem until 1978.

more here.

Alan Lightman in Nautilus:

One morning in Maine, soon after dawn, I stood by the ocean just as a light fog began moving in. The rising sun became a gauzy fire. Suddenly, the air started to glow. Fog scattered the sunlight, bounced it around and back and forth until each cupful of air shone with its own source of light. In all directions, the air beamed and shimmered and glowed, and the gulls stopped their squawking and the ospreys became quiet. For some time, I stood there spellbound by the silence and the glowing air. I felt as if inside a cathedral of sunlight and air. Then the fog burned away and the glow disappeared.

Hinduism has a concept called darshan, which is the opportunity to experience the sacred. One is advised to be open to such experiences.

I’m a scientist and have always had a scientific view of the world—by which I mean that the universe is made of material stuff, and only material stuff, and that stuff is governed by a small number of fundamental laws. Every phenomenon has a cause, which originates in the physical universe. I’m a materialist. Not in the sense of seeking happiness in cars and nice clothes, but in the literal sense of the word: the belief that everything is made out of atoms and molecules, and nothing more. Yet, I have transcendent experiences. I witnessed the air shining that morning in Maine. I’ve communed with wild ospreys. I have feelings of being part of things larger than myself. I have a sense of connection to other people and to the world of living things, even to the stars. I have a sense of beauty. I have experiences of awe. And I’ve had transporting creative moments. Of course, all of us have had similar feelings and moments. While these experiences are not exactly the same, they have sufficient similarity that I’ll gather them together under the heading of “spirituality.” I will call myself a spiritual materialist.

More here. (Note: For Abbasi. See comment)