Louis Menand in The New Yorker:

What is “creative nonfiction,” exactly? Isn’t the term an oxymoron? Creative writers—playwrights, poets, novelists—are people who make stuff up. Which means that the basic definition of “nonfiction writer” is a writer who doesn’t make stuff up, or is not supposed to make stuff up. If nonfiction writers are “creative” in the sense that poets and novelists are creative, if what they write is partly make-believe, are they still writing nonfiction? Biographers and historians sometimes adopt a narrative style intended to make their books read more like novels. Maybe that’s what people mean by “creative nonfiction”? Here are the opening sentences of a best-selling, Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of John Adams published a couple of decades ago:

In the cold, nearly colorless light of a New England winter, two men on horseback traveled the coast road below Boston, heading north. A foot or more of snow covered the landscape, the remnants of a Christmas storm that had blanketed Massachusetts from one end of the province to the other. Beneath the snow, after weeks of severe cold, the ground was frozen solid to a depth of two feet. Packed ice in the road, ruts as hard as iron, made the going hazardous, and the riders, mindful of the horses, kept at a walk.

This does read like a novel. Is it nonfiction? The only source the author cites for this paragraph verifies the statement “weeks of severe cold.” Presumably, the “Christmas storm” has a source, too, perhaps in newspapers of the time (1776). The rest—the light, the exact depth of frozen ground, the packed ice, the ruts, the riders’ mindfulness, the walking horses—seems to have been extrapolated in order to unfold a dramatic scene, evoke a mental picture. There is also the novelistic device of delaying the identification of the characters. It isn’t until the third paragraph that we learn that one of the horsemen is none other than John Adams! It’s all perfectly plausible, but much of it is imagined. Is being “creative” simply a license to embellish? Is there a point beyond which inference becomes fantasy?

More here.

Howard Zinn in Delancey Place:

After the Revolution in the United States, American society coalesced around controlling women’s behavior and sexual activity while exploiting their labor. Women’s “reduced rate,” or free labor in the case of slaves, was critical to the growing economy. And they were coerced, compelled, and conditioned to be meekly submissive. They were encouraged to “not expect too much”:

“[A]fter the Revolution, none of the new state constitutions granted women the right to vote, except for New Jersey, and that state rescinded the right in 1807. New York’s con­stitution specifically disfranchised women by using the word ‘male.’

While perhaps 90 percent of the white male population were literate around 1750, only 40 percent of the women were. Working-class women had little means of communicating, and no means of recording whatever sentiments of rebelliousness they may have felt at their subor­dination. Not only were they bearing children in great numbers, under great hardships, but they were working in the home. Around the time of the Declaration of Independence, four thousand women and children in Philadelphia were spinning at home for local plants under the ‘putting out’ system. Women also were shopkeepers and innkeepers and engaged in many trades. They were bakers, tinworkers, brewers, tan­ners, ropemakers, lumberjacks, printers, morticians, woodworkers, stay­makers, and more. Ideas of female equality were in the air during and after the Revolution. Tom Paine spoke out for the equal rights of women. And the pioneering book of Mary Wollstonecraft in England, A Vindication of the Rights of Women, was reprinted in the United States shortly after the Revolutionary War.

Wollstonecraft was responding to the English con­servative and opponent of the French Revolution, Edmund Burke, who had written in his Reflections on the Revolution in France that ‘a woman is but an animal, and an animal not of the highest order.’

More here.

Mending Wall

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
‘Stay where you are until our backs are turned!’
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of outdoor game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
‘Why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.’ I could say ‘Elves’ to him,
But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father’s saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’

by Robert Frost – 1874-1963
from The Poetry of Robert Frost
Ballantine Books, 1970

Adrienne Raphel at JSTOR Daily:

Charles Simic, the late, great Serbian-American poet, was born in 1938 in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. In 1941, when Simic was three, Hitler invaded, and a bomb explosion hurled Simic out of bed. Three years later, in 1944, another series of detonations exploded across town—this time, dropped by Allies. Images of a war-torn country inform Simic’s earliest memories. Belgrade had become a chess board, a deadly battleground for both the Nazis and Allies. Simic emigrated as a boy to the United States, and he wrote poetry in English, but the hellish landscape of his youth lay at the heart of his work.

Simic was also a chess prodigy, and the game rewired his brain. As he wrote in the New York Review of Books, “The kinds of poems I write—mostly short and requiring endless tinkering—often recall for me games of chess. They depend for their success on word and image being placed in proper order and their endings must have the inevitability and surprise of an elegantly executed checkmate.”

More here.

Anil Ananthaswamy in Quanta:

The key is that each piece of information, such as the notion of a car, or its make, model or color, or all of it together, is represented as a single entity: a hyperdimensional vector.

A vector is simply an ordered array of numbers. A 3D vector, for example, comprises three numbers: the x, y and z coordinates of a point in 3D space. A hyperdimensional vector, or hypervector, could be an array of 10,000 numbers, say, representing a point in 10,000-dimensional space. These mathematical objects and the algebra to manipulate them are flexible and powerful enough to take modern computing beyond some of its current limitations and foster a new approach to artificial intelligence.

“This is the thing that I’ve been most excited about, practically in my entire career,” Olshausen said. To him and many others, hyperdimensional computing promises a new world in which computing is efficient and robust, and machine-made decisions are entirely transparent.

More here.

Stuart Whatley in The Hedgehog Review:

To most people today, the notion of a leisure ethic will sound foreign, paradoxical, and indeed subversive, even though leisure is still commonly associated with the good life. More than any other society in the past, ours certainly has the technology and the wealth to furnish more people with greater freedom over more of their time. Yet because we lack a shared leisure ethic, we have not availed ourselves of that option. Nor does it occur to us even to demand or strive for such a dispensation.

One reason for this is that the values and culture that created our current abundance may be incompatible with actually enjoying it. Sparta had the same problem.

More here.

Victor Tangermann at Futurism:

The researchers found that their agents could “produce believable individual and emergent social behaviors.” For instance, one agent attempted to throw a Valentine’s Day party by sending out invites and setting a time and place for the party.

A Smallville mayoral race also included the kind of drama you’d expect to occur in a small town.

“To be honest, I don’t like Sam Moore,” an agent called Tom said after being asked what he thought of the mayoral candidate. “I think he’s out of touch with the community and doesn’t have our best interests at heart.”

It got even more human than that.

More here.  Research paper here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbp6ObL-ilI&ab_channel=NewsX

Sophie Wright in LensCulture:

The thought of adding crickets to a summer gazpacho or making your tacos out of honey bee moths is likely to make the majority of us squirm. But faced with a future of growing food scarcity, insects may soon become a kitchen staple; a regular ingredient in our everyday cooking. In Beatle in the box, Italian photographers Michela Benaglia and Emanuela Colombo combine various genres such as still life and food photography in a bid to normalize this fact visually. Rich with proteins, vitamins, carbs, omega-3 fatty acids, calcium, iron and other micronutrients, bugs and beasties have a low environmental-impact as food. They are small, meaning they cause less greenhouse gasses which is an important factor in livestock farming, and they can also be bred easily with few resources. In short, they might be the food of our future. The photographers propose a handy comparison: the growth and spread of sushi through the West in the 1990s—first as a trend, then as a food business.

In this interview with Sophie Wright for LensCulture, the pair discuss the benefits of eating bugs, the process of insect studio photography and their favorite recipe.

Sophie Wright: How would you describe the key concerns that drive your photography practice? And did Beatle in the box grow out of any existing interests or does it mark a departure from your previous work?

Michela Benaglia & Emanuela Colombo: As documentary photographers we usually work on various current issues that capture our interest and have not yet been explored. Beatle in the box is not an exception: we usually work as reportage photographers, but for this theme the studio photography seemed to us the most effective.

SW: How did your interest in the topic first arise?

MB & EC: We discovered a new law that, starting in 2018, ‘Novel Food’ will enter into force facilitating the sale and the supply of insects within the European Union, bringing all member states on a par with Holland and Belgium where insect-based products have already been for sale in supermarkets for a long time.

More here. (Note: In honor of the first course made up of ants, worms, crickets, scorpions and tiny lobsters my daughter Sheherzad and I enjoyed in Tulum, Mexico, last week)

Ezra Klein in The New York Times:

Among the many unique experiences of reporting on A.I. is this: In a young industry flooded with hype and money, person after person tells me that they are desperate to be regulated, even if it slows them down. In fact, especially if it slows them down. What they tell me is obvious to anyone watching. Competition is forcing them to go too fast and cut too many corners. This technology is too important to be left to a race between Microsoft, Google, Meta and a few other firms. But no one company can slow down to a safe pace without risking irrelevancy. That’s where the government comes in — or so they hope.

A place to start is with the frameworks policymakers have already put forward to govern A.I. The two major proposals, at least in the West, are the “Blueprint for an A.I. Bill of Rights,” which the White House put forward in 2022, and the Artificial Intelligence Act, which the European Commission proposed in 2021. Then, last week, China released its latest regulatory approach. Let’s start with the European proposal, as it came first. The Artificial Intelligence Act tries to regulate A.I. systems according to how they’re used. It is particularly concerned with high-risk uses, which include everything from overseeing critical infrastructure to grading papers to calculating credit scores to making hiring decisions. High-risk uses, in other words, are any use in which a person’s life or livelihood might depend on a decision made by a machine-learning algorithm.

More here.

Exit Strategy

Tell me there is a way to believe it all,
an exit strategy with groggy murmurs
of nothing but rest and a quiet universe.

All I can think of is my child, asleep
in bed, dealing with whatever birthright
his dreams afford his fears, waiting to wake.

Sometimes I feel like Kepler, poised to inherit
pages of wrinkled data, but grumbling,
What a holy-fucking mess Tycho left behind.

Under the surface of the crowd’s rumble
is a song. We could have danced, you know,
to the how-not-why of these perfect heartbeats.

It’s true. You’ve not been asked to understand.
You’ve been asked to listen, and work it out.

George Murray
from: The Rush to Here.
Nightwood Editions, 2007

Noah Berlatsky at the LA Times:

“They could never believe in a giant fish that holds a whole world. They’d laugh. They’d scoff. Even if they saw it, they wouldn’t believe it. That is why the human race is dying — too limited an imagination.”

The above quote from Jeff VanderMeer’s first novel, 2003’s “Veniss Underground,” is a kind of statement of purpose for his career. As one of the leading writers of the New Weird, VanderMeer has taken it as his aesthetic and ethical task to push the bounds of the imagination to bizarre, absurd and disgusting extremes.

A new edition of the book, including related stories, fragments and commentary by VanderMeer, shows how consistent his methods and goals have remained over the last 20 years. It also shows, however, that even as he’s grown into a bigger fish, he’s become — admirably and definitively — weirder.

more here.

Anthony Quinn at The Guardian:

A dream prospect. Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the short-lived, self-destructive wunderkind who made movies about love as masochism, pain as an inevitable condition and history as a dire weight upon his native Germany, has long been in need of an equally forthright celebration. And who better to provide it than one-time NME star, cultural contrarian and film nut Ian Penman, in his first original book since his great comeback suite of music essays, It Gets Me Home, This Curving Track, in 2019? Well, hold your horses.

Fassbinder – RWF – was an artist whose work once had a “huge and axis-shifting effect” on Penman as a young cinephile. Now, in his early 60s, the fan wonders exactly why he was so enthralled by the film-maker. Straight off, he made the mistake, he says, of trying to rewatch the oeuvre in lockdown: Fassbinder films are about the very last thing you need during an enforced isolation. Berlin Alexanderplatz, his “iconic” TV series, was “especially hard going”. (Funnily enough, I tried the same thing, same time, and had to retire hurt after two episodes.)

more here.

Elham Saeidinezhad in Phenomenal World:

We live in a period of unparalleled financial complexity, and, as the history of recent decades has demonstrated, unparalleled financial risk. The recurring crises which plague the global economy have brought theorists of systemic instability to the fore. Key among them has been Hyman Minsky, whose framework for understanding financial market fragility takes a cyclical form. In his model, an excessive credit expansion (“displacement”) fuels a speculative bubble (“mania” ) and causes “financial distress,” leading to credit contraction and the bursting of the bubble (“panic” ).

The appeal of Minsky’s model lies, in part, in its “structural” perspective. In contrast to the general tendency to disregard financial market practices, Minsky leveraged institutional and legal structures of the financial markets to develop his views. A classic example is his interpretation of the 1980s debt crisis—unlike orthodox theories of profit determination based on productivity and market power, Minsky linked firms’ performance to the developments of the financial market. Specifically, he focused on the 1980s merger and acquisition mania and the structure of junk bonds. Whereas neoclassical theories priced cash flows based on profitability, Minsky analyzed them as claims on firms’ tangible assets, which were often used as collateral for junk bond loans. In the ‘80s, financial distress thus enabled issuers to refrain from making payments, generating a liquidity crisis that neoclassical frameworks could not understand.

More here.

Lee Harris in The American Prospect:

In the spring of 2011, heavy rainfall swelled the Mississippi River to record levels, flooding trailer parks and pushing up gas prices as refineries and fuel terminals along the waterway closed. Surveying the wreckage, Heather McTeer Toney, then mayor of Greenville, Mississippi, found a crucial partner in Mars, Inc., the international conglomerate that makes M&M’s and pet food.

Mars operates an 80-acre rice farm in Greenville—its largest factory in the world. The company sent senior officials and shared its in-house risk assessment with Toney, which helped her plan the city’s police and fire response, design street upgrades, identify points of weakness in the wastewater and levee systems, and work with the Army Corps of Engineers.

“Today, we would call that climate risk,” Toney told the Prospect, but at the time it was “just protecting infrastructure.”

Local officials, civil engineers, and homeowners describe a growing need for information on exposure to the risks of extreme weather. In the past five years, demand has exploded. But not all cities have an anchor business as willing to share as Mars, and many might prefer not to depend on private industry for public planning.

Financial markets and private companies, meanwhile, are in an “arms race” for climate intelligence. Some firms have announced decarbonization plans, while others are pledging to double down on fossil fuels. Regulators, struggling to keep up, have asked for more disclosure.

Private climate risk modelers have been the beneficiaries of this gold rush. Their guidance falls into two buckets: physical risk, or material exposure of assets to hazards, or transition risk, which includes fallout from policy changes, impact on the financial system, and reputation.

More here.

Charlie Tyson in Jewish Currents:

KARL MARX’S GIFT FOR SATIRE is often underestimated. In his chapter on the working day in Capital, he recounts the death of a 20-year-old dressmaker named Mary Anne Walkley who was “exploited by a lady with the pleasant name of Elise.” After working for 26 1/2 hours straight in a cramped, poorly ventilated room, Walkley suddenly expired, “without, to the astonishment of Madame Elise, having finished off the bit of finery she was working on.” Zola at his most acidic could hardly do better.

Marx peppers the text of Capital with such blackly comic moments. Quoting a factory manager who justifies the 15-hour workday he requires by noting that his machine is always stopped for dinner, Marx comments in a parenthetical: “What generosity!” Describing the adulteration of bread resulting from the capitalist takeover of the baking industry, he reflects: “Englishmen, with their good command of the Bible, knew well enough that man, unless by elective grace a capitalist . . . is destined to eat his bread in the sweat of his brow.” But these pious Brits did not know that their bread would include “cobwebs, dead cockroaches,” and sand, among “other agreeable mineral ingredients.”

If the socialist writer Paul Lafargue, the husband of Marx’s daughter Laura, could not rival his father-in-law’s brilliance or scholarship, he took up the economist’s satirical streak with great enthusiasm, writing humorous sketches, essays, stories, and speeches.

More here.