Andy Kifer in The New York Times:

Martin Sherwin was hardly your classic blocked writer. Outgoing, funny, and athletic, he is described by those who knew him as the opposite of neurotic.

But by the late 1990s, he had to admit he was stuck. Sherwin, a history professor and the author of one previous book, had agreed to write a full-scale biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer two decades earlier. Now he wondered if he would ever finish it. He’d done plenty of research — an extraordinary amount, actually, amassing some 50,000 pages of interviews, transcripts, letters, diaries, declassified documents and F.B.I. dossiers, stored in seemingly endless boxes in his basement, attic and office. But he’d barely written a word.

Sherwin had originally tried to turn the project down, his wife remembered, telling his editor, Angus Cameron, that he didn’t think he was seasoned enough to take on such a consequential subject as Oppenheimer, the so-called father of the atomic bomb. But Cameron, who had published Sherwin’s first book at Knopf — and who, like Oppenheimer, had been a victim of McCarthyism — insisted.

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Jon Askonas in The New Atlantis:

How hot is it outside today? And why did you think of a number as the answer, not something you felt?

A feeling is too subjective, too hard to communicate. But a number is easy to pass on. It seems to stand on its own, apart from any person’s experience. It’s a fact.

Of course, the heat of the day is not the only thing that has slipped from being thought of as an experience to being thought of as a number. When was the last time you reckoned the hour by the height of the sun in the sky? When was the last time you stuck your head out a window to judge the air’s damp? At some point in history, temperature, along with just about everything else, moved from a quality you observe to a quantity you measure. It’s the story of how facts came to be in the modern world.

This may sound odd. Facts are such a familiar part of our mental landscape today that it is difficult to grasp that to the premodern mind they were as alien as a filing cabinet. But the fact is a recent invention.

More here.

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Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

Complexity scientists have been able to make an impressive amount of progress despite the fact that there is not universal agreement about what “complexity” actually is. We know it when we see it, perhaps, but there are a number of aspects to the phenomenon, and different researchers will naturally focus on their favorites. Today’s guest, David Krakauer, is president of the Santa Fe Institute and a longtime researcher in complexity. He points the finger at the concept of agency. A ball rolling down a hill just mindlessly obeys equations of motion, but a complex system gathers information and uses it to adapt. We talk about what that means and how to think about the current state of complexity science.

More here.

Noah Smith in Noahpinion:

The struggle to control the semiconductor industry is one of the most important economic stories in the world today. Whether China can wrest dominance of semiconductors away from the U.S. and its democratic allies, as it has so many other high-tech industries, will go a long way toward determining the military balance of power this century. And the best book you can read to familiarize yourself with the basics of this titanic struggle is Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology, by Tufts University historian Chris Miller. I reviewed the book here; its place at the top of many lists of the “best books of 2022” was well-deserved. I’m not sure I’ve ever read a book that does such a good job of crafting key events into a tight, readable narrative while also teaching readers key facts about a complex technology.

But what’s even more amazing about Chip War is that the book came out just a few days before the Biden administration launched a sweeping regime of export controls aimed at stifling China’s high-end chip industry.

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Elaine Velie at Hyperallergic:

For six decades, Alice Neel rendered intimate depictions of strangers, lovers, and friends, capturing fleeting moments, moods, and personalities in her beloved expressionistic paintings. Now through October, visitors to the Orange County Museum of Art (OCMA) can become acquainted with a lesser-known subject of Neel’s paintings: pets. Amidst a total of 40 works, Alice Neel: Feels Like Home showcases five paintings of cats, dogs, and one parrot, all of which Neel portrayed with her characteristic familiarity and attention to individuality.

“It’s something that really struck me when I started doing more research and looking at the work,” OCMA’s Chief Curator Courtenay Finn told Hyperallergic. “They are characters and personalities in their own right along with the people, which I think is kind of incredible.”

more here.

Stephen Piccarella at n+1:

THE PURPOSE OF VESTIBULAR THERAPY is to induce symptoms of dizziness so that the brain becomes accustomed to accommodating them until they subside or are no longer noticeable. It’s a kind of physical therapy designed to train and improve the functioning of the vestibular system —the inner ear—which determines a body’s balance and stable position in space. Dysfunction of the vestibular system can result in a range of complications, from vertigo to ataxia to double vision. I’m currently receiving treatment for convergence insufficiency, a slight misalignment or tendency to turn outward of one eye (my left), and Persistent Postural Perceptual Dizziness, a chronic “non-spinning” dizziness that causes disorientation and foggy thinking without necessarily impeding physical balance. My symptoms are constant, but interfere mostly with visual processing—usually when I’m reading, particularly on a screen, or when I’m in a busy public place.

Eliciting these diagnoses turned out to be far from easy. That surprised me, but not anyone I know who deals with doctors on a regular basis.

more here.

Oshan Jarow in Vox:

In 1998, at the conference of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (ASSC), the neuroscientist Christof Koch made a bet with the philosopher David Chalmers: by 2023, science would be able to explain how the brain’s tangle of neurons gives rise to the phenomenon we call consciousness. The winner would get a case of wine. Koch was a professor of cognitive biology who helped pioneer the mechanistic study of the “neural correlates of consciousness,” which maps the relationship between brain activity and subjective experiences. He believed that consciousness was fundamentally measurable and that it was only a matter of time before science identified how it arose in the brain.

Chalmers was both a philosopher and cognitive scientist who was skeptical that science would be able to build explanatory bridges between neural correlates in the brain and the subjective experience of consciousness. Famously, he called consciousness “the hard problem,” which he believed was sufficiently challenging to keep any explanation of consciousness at bay for at least a quarter of a century. At the 26th ASSC conference this past weekend, 25 years after the initial wager, the results were declared: Koch lost. Despite years of scientific effort — a time during which the science of consciousness shifted from the fringe to a mainstream, reputable, even exciting area of study — we still can’t say how or why the experience of consciousness arises.

Galileo split consciousness away from science 400 years ago

While the Western science of consciousness only grew into a reputable field over the past few decades, part of the reason answers remain so elusive may be buried in the deep structure of scientific inquiry itself, reaching back to the 1600s.

More here.

Cara Buckley in The New York Times:

Xiulin Ruan, a professor of mechanical engineering at Purdue University, didn’t set out to make it into the Guinness World Records when he began trying to make a new type of paint. He had a loftier goal: to cool down buildings without torching the Earth.

In 2020, Dr. Ruan and his team unveiled their creation: a type of white paint that can act as a reflector, bouncing 95 percent of the sun’s rays away from the Earth’s surface, up through the atmosphere and into deep space. A few months later, they announced an even more potent formulation that increased sunlight reflection to 98 percent. The paint’s properties are almost superheroic. It can make surfaces as much as eight degrees Fahrenheit cooler than ambient air temperatures at midday, and up to 19 degrees cooler at night, reducing temperatures inside buildings and decreasing air-conditioning needs by as much as 40 percent. It is cool to the touch, even under a blazing sun, Dr. Ruan said. Unlike air-conditioners, the paint doesn’t need any energy to work, and it doesn’t warm the outside air.

In 2021, Guinness declared it the whitest paint ever, and it’s since collected several awards. While the paint was originally envisioned for rooftops, manufacturers of clothes, shoes, cars, trucks and even spacecraft have come clamoring. Last year, Dr. Ruan and his team announced that they’d come up with a more lightweight version that could reflect heat from vehicles.

More here.

Rachel Yoder at Harper’s Magazine:

What the old Amish woman named Rachel Smoker and others like her practice is called, depending on whom you ask, powwow or Braucherei or pulling pain or active prayer or witchcraft or folk-cultural religious ritual, though Rachel Smoker would never call it any of these things. She prefers “natural healing” and “reflexology.”

I came to find her because of a book of spells. And I sought out this book because it seemed to me one of the more compelling corners of my Amish and Mennonite heritage, though it had never once been mentioned to me growing up. The book—The Long Lost Friend: A Collection of Mysterious and Invaluable Arts and Remedies, also called the “Famous Witchbook of the Pennsylvania Dutch”—was compiled in the early nineteenth century by John George Hohman, a German-speaking immigrant.

more here.

Kevin Power at Literary Review:

How is a totalitarian state like a love affair? They both leave archives behind when they go. How is a totalitarian state like a bad love affair? The archive that survives the end of each is a monument to abuse, surveillance and betrayal.

This equivalence is indirectly evoked in the opening pages of Jenny Erpenbeck’s fourth novel, Kairos. The totalitarian state in question is the German Democratic Republic, whose Ministry for State Security (or Stasi) generated, in its forty years of existence, ‘the equivalent of all records in German history since the middle ages’ (this factoid comes courtesy not of Erpenbeck but of Anna Funder’s semi-elegiac 2003 portrait of GDR life, Stasiland).

The love affair at the centre of Kairos is that of Hans and Katharina.

more here.

Robin Ashenden in Quillette:

For a long time before his death this week at the age of 94, the novelist Milan Kundera seemed to have fallen out of fashion with critics. Jonathan Coe wrote of his “problematic sexual politics” with their “ripples of disquiet.” Alex Preston complained about the “adolescent and posturing” flavour of the books which had thrilled him in his youth, adding of Kundera’s later novels that reading them was an “increasingly laboured process of digging out the occasional gems from the abstraction and tub-thumping philosophising… a series of retreats into mere cleverness.” Diane Johnson of the New York Times seemed to ring the death knell loudest: “what he has to tell us seems to have less relevance… the world has run beyond some of the concerns that still preoccupy him.”

Doubtless Kundera’s light had dimmed in the last few decades. No substantial novel had come from him since Immortality (1990), just before he switched from writing in Czech to French. Yet these critics’ withdrawal of support seemed modish, ironic, and not without schadenfreude.

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Leon Vlieger in The Inquisitive Biologist:

We Are All Whalers is veterinary scientist Michael J. Moore’s account of a life spent studying different whale species and what is killing them. He argues that anyone participating in our global economy has blood on their hands, often without realising it. Readers are warned that this book does not avoid graphic details. His research has ultimately drawn him to the problems of whales getting entangled in fishing gear and being struck by ships. However, it is the path that took him there, through both industrial and subsistence whaling, that might leave some readers more upset.

More here.

Dan Milmo in The Guardian:

Major economies are on the “cusp of an AI revolution” that could trigger job losses in skilled professions such as law, medicine and finance, according to an influential international organisation.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) said the occupations at highest risk from AI-driven automation were highly skilled jobs and represented about 27% of employment across its 38 member countries, which include the UK, Japan, Germany, the US, Australia and Canada.

The body said it was “clear that the potential for [AI-driven jobs] substitution remains significant, raising fears of decreasing wages and job losses”.

More here.

  “You can’t write poems about the trees when the woods are full of policemen.” 
…………………………………………………………………………………… —Bertolt Brecht

Broken Ghazal for Walter Scott

A video looping like a dirge on repeat, my soul—a psalm of bullets in my back.
I see you running, then drop, heavy hunted like prey with eight shots in the back.

Again, in my Facebook feed another black man dead, another fist in my throat.
You: prostrate on the green grass, handcuffed with your hands tied to your back.

Praises for the video, to the witness & his recording thumb, praises to YouTube
for taking the blindfold off Lady Justice, dipping her scales down with old weight

of strange fruit, to American eyeballs blinking & chewing the 24-hour news cycle:
another black body, another white cop. But let us go back to the broken tail light,

let’s find a man behind on his child support, let’s become his children, let’s call him
Papa. Let us chant Papa don’t run! Stay, stay back! Stay here with us. But Tiana—

you have got to stop watching this video. Walter is gone & he is not your daddy,
another story will come to your feed, stay back. But whisper—stay, once more,

with the denied breath of his absent CPR, praise his mother strumming Santana
with tiny hallelujahs up & down the harp of his back. Praise his mother hugging

the man who made her son a viral hit, a rerun to watch him die ad infintum, again
we go back, click replay at any moment. A video looping like a dirge on repeat—

by Tianna Clark
from I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018

Lea and Cain in The Guardian:

Czech writer Milan Kundera, who explored being and betrayal over half a century in poems, plays, essays and novels including The Unbearable Lightness of Being, has died aged 94 after a prolonged illness, Anna Mrazova, spokeswoman for the Milan Kundera Library, has confirmed.

Famously leaving his homeland for France in 1975 after earlier being expelled from the Czechoslovakian Communist party for “anti-communist activities”, Kundera spent 40 years living in exile in Paris after his Czech citizenship was revoked in 1979. There he wrote his most famous works, including Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí (The Unbearable Lightness of Being) and later left behind his mother tongue to write novels in French, beginning with 1995’s La Lenteur (Slowness) and his final novel, 2014’s The Festival of Insignificance. He was often cited as a contender for the Nobel prize in literature.

More here.