Alexandra Witze in Nature:

For decades, scientists who study Mars have watched in envy as spacecraft brought pieces of the Moon, chunks of asteroids and even samples of the solar wind to Earth to be studied. Now some of those researchers might finally be on track to receive rocks from the red planet — but only if NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) can pull off a complex and daring mission.

For several years, the two agencies have been planning to send spacecraft to Mars, starting no earlier than 2027, to pick up rock samples that are being collected by NASA’s Perseverance rover. But technological and financial hurdles could derail the multi-billion-dollar scheme. Last month, NASA said it wants to allocate nearly US$1 billion to Mars sample return in the upcoming fiscal year — a huge sum that could force the agency to dip into other parts of its science budget. This would affect other projects, potentially delaying a planned heliophysics mission, for example. And much is at stake for the Mars sample return: Perseverance has gathered a scientifically stunning set of rocks. In December and January, the rover deposited ten cigar-sized tubes filled with rock, soil and air from the Martian atmosphere on a flat area of the planet’s surface for a future mission to pick up (see ‘Sample depot’).

More here.

The Longest Way ‘Round

Mommy taught
3rd grade
Her book was The Longest
Way ’Round (Is The Shortest Way Home)

I was an adult
Before I realized
How True

Their marriage
Is none of your business
You don’t understand
Your parents don’t owe
You anything
You finally say to yourself:
They Have Nothing
I want
Except
I remember this Blue Book
With a wonderful title
My Mother West Wind Stories
And Mommy singing
“Time After Time”

It worked
I am Happy

by Nikki Giovanni
from The Poetry Foundation

Joel Whitney at Public Books:

“Our Latin American literature has always been a committed, a responsible literature,” explained Guatemalan novelist Miguel Ángel Asturias in 1973.

The great works of our countries have been written in response to a vital need, a need of the people, and therefore almost all our literature is committed. Only as an exception do some of our writers isolate themselves and become uninterested in what is happening around them; such writers are concerned with psychological or egocentric subjects and the problems of a personality out of contact with surrounding reality.

It is the bourgeois writers, he wants to say here, who ignore the looting of their resources by the rich behemoth to the north, which then turns around and redeploys those riches on death squads and dictators. It is no surprise, then, that Asturias’s landmark novel, Mr. President, confronts its readers with similar frankness. Mr. President examines widespread corruption around a fictional Guatemalan dictator. But its 1946 debut reflected a delay of more than a decade by the country’s real dictators, who disrupted the novel’s genesis and sent its author into exile. And in this act of suppression, Asturias’s censors and exilers were aided by the US, specifically the CIA.

Such suppression has long impaired Asturias’s career, reputation, and recognition. Indeed, in a new introduction to Mr. President—out last summer in David Unger’s lucid new translation—literary scholar Gerald Martin calls the novel “the first page of the Boom.” “The Boom” was the nickname for a clutch of new Latin American novels emerging in the 1960s, including those by future Nobel laureates Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa.

More here.

Grace Wade in New Scientist:

Drug overdose deaths have steadily increased in the US since 1999, largely due to the proliferation of prescription and illicit opioids like morphine, oxycodone and fentanyl.

“There’s been a lot of focus on overdose among younger people,” says Chelsea Shover at the University of California, Los Angeles. “We wanted to understand to what degree is that happening among older adults.”

She and her colleagues collected data on overdose deaths in adults 65 years and older from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s WONDER database. The database tracks every fatality recorded in the country, including the person’s age, race, gender and cause of death.

More here.

Mohammed El-Kurd in The Nation:

As an insider observing this food fight, it is surreal to watch reporters and commentators promote the narrative that the government’s Likud-Jewish Power-Religious Zionism coalition and the Supreme Court exist on extreme opposing ends of the political spectrum. Their differences, when it comes to how they rule over the lives of Palestinians, are purely cosmetic. In essence, one camp wants to eat with their hands while the other wants to mandate forks and knives, but in both scenarios, Palestinian rights will be devoured.

“Ironic” doesn’t begin to describe hearing words like “leftist” and “hyper-activist” in proximity to the Supreme Court, the settler-built and settler-serving institution that has, for decades, authorized and facilitated the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian population. Are we all talking about the same court here? Palestinians are forced to engage in a starkly different relationship with the law than the one Jewish Israelis enjoy.

More here.

Vincent Lloyd in Compact:

On the sunny first day of seminar, I sat at the end of a pair of picnic tables with nervous, excited 17-year-olds. Twelve high-school students had been chosen by the Telluride Association through a rigorous application process—the acceptance rate is reportedly around 3 percent—to spend six weeks together taking a college-level course, all expenses paid.

The group reminded me of the heroes of the Mysterious Benedict Society books I was reading to my daughter: Each teenager, brought together for a common project, had some extraordinary ability and some quirk. One girl from California spoke and thought at machine-gun speed and started collecting pet snails during the pandemic; now she had more than 100. A girl from a provincial school in China had never traveled to the United States but had mastered un-accented English and was in love with E.M. Forster. In addition to the seminar, the students practiced democratic self-governance: They lived together and set their own rules. Those first few days, the students were exactly what you would expect, at turns bubbly and reserved, all of them curious, playful, figuring out how to relate to each other and to the seminar texts.

Four weeks later, I again sat in front of the gathered students. Now, their faces were cold, their eyes down. Since the first week, I had not spotted one smile. Their number was reduced by two: The previous week, they had voted two classmates out of the house. And I was next.

More here.

Anthony Lane in The New Yorker:

Trying to sort out who is who, and what everybody wants, is no easy task in “Joyland,” a début feature from the Pakistani director Saim Sadiq. In Lahore, a woman named Nucchi (Sarwat Gilani), who already has three daughters, remarks that her water has broken; she might as well be announcing that dinner is served. For the birth of her fourth child, she is ferried to hospital on the back of a moped driven by Haider (Ali Junejo), whom we take to be her husband. Not so. He is, in fact, the brother of her husband, Saleem (Sameer Sohail). Haider is married to Mumtaz (Rasti Farooq); they have no offspring, to the dismay of his aged father, known as Abba (Salmaan Peerzada). All of the above inhabit one household. It’s not a peaceful place, or an especially happy one, but it’s home.

That home is worth dwelling on, for it feels like a book of short stories. Not for a while—not, perhaps, since Greta Gerwig’s “Little Women” (2019)—have I been struck by so potent a sense of place. The daily routine revolves around a central courtyard, where Abba, a widower in a wheelchair, presides. “My family has lived here since before Partition,” he says. Space is tight, and one of the little girls often shares a bed with Haider and Mumtaz. The air-conditioning breaks down. (Power outages are frequent across the city, and some scenes are illuminated by cell-phone flashlights.) The fabric of the film is a weaving of new and old; we hear talk of Netflix subscriptions, yet one shot, of an open doorway, has the pious composure of a Pieter de Hooch interior, from seventeenth-century Holland, and the plot begins, if you please, with a goat being slaughtered in the courtyard. Blood pools darkly on the tiled floor.

More here.

Larry Groff in Painting Perceptions:

“Barbara Kassel”s evocative paintings explore the passage of time. From her loft in New York City, she paints interior and exterior views, creating a visual diary of daily life. Working with oil on panel, the smooth surfaces are meticulously rendered serene scenes. Warm reds and yellow embrace cooler blues and grays and invite the viewer into the large-scale works. Kassel describes the paintings in part biographical and instinctually narrative. Carefully exploring the world around her, she mixes observation and invention as she captures fleeting moments in time.”

Larry Groff: Can you tell us something about your background? What lead you to become a painter?

Barbara Kassel:    I was born in Los Angeles and grew up in the valley, in Studio City. I remember always drawing, painting and working on various craft projects. My older brother would use a red pencil to mark when I went out of the coloring book lines! I took my first art classes outside of school at a little frame/art shop on Ventura Blvd called The Flemish Art Shop. I painted Dutch like still lives with copal varnish as the medium, still lifes with watermelons and flowers and many a bright eyed furry kitten. I think that I came to painting as it was the most natural and satisfying way for me to be in the world. I liked the way I could create something, something that expressed the visual world and in a way, even early on, my interior life. My father had a serious heart condition and died of his third heart attack when I was 16. That had a profound effect on my life and how it unfolded. Immersing myself in painting and drawing had and continues to have a calming effect on me and helps me to integrate different aspects of my life.

More here.

Brotherhood

—Homage to Claudius Ptolemy

I am a man: little do I last
and the night is enormous.
But I look up:
the stars write.
Unknowing I understand:
I too am written,
and at this very moment
someone spells me out.

by Octavio Paz
from The Collected Poems, 1957-1987
Carcanet Press Ltd. 1988
…….. ~~~
Hermandad

Soy hombre: duro poco
y es enorme la noche.
Pero miro hacia arriba:
Sin entender comprendo:
También soy escritura
y en este mismo isnstante
alguien me deletrea

Jacob Browning and Yann Lecun in Noema:

With artificial intelligence now powering Microsoft’s Bing and Google’s Bard search engines, brilliant and clever conversational AI is at our fingertips. But there have been many uncanny moments — including casually delivered disturbing comments like calling a reporter ugly, declaring love for strangers or rattling off plans for taking over the world.

To make sense of these bizarre moments, it’s helpful to start by thinking about the phenomenon of saying the wrong thing. Humans are usually very good at avoiding spoken mistakes, gaffes and faux pas. Chatbots, by contrast, screw up a lot. Understanding why humans excel at this clarifies when and why we trust each other — and why current chatbots can’t be trusted.

Getting It Wrong

For GPT-3, there is only one way to say the wrong thing: By making a statistically unlikely response to whatever the last few words were. Its understanding of context, situation and appropriateness concerns only what can be derived from the user’s prompt. For ChatGPT, this is modified slightly in a novel and interesting way. In addition to saying something statistically likely, the model’s responses are also reinforced by human evaluators: The system outputs a response, and human evaluators either reinforce it as a good one or not (a grueling, traumatizing process for the evaluators). The upshot is a system that is not just saying something plausible, but also (ideally) something a human would judge to be appropriate — if not the right thing, at least not offensive.

But this approach makes visible a central challenge facing any speaker — mechanical or otherwise. In human conversation, there are countless ways to say the wrong thing…

More here.

David Van Reybrouk in Noema:

Here is what it might look like: At the polling station during the next general election, you get not one but two ballot papers. The first is your usual list of candidates and their political parties. The second is something new — a document with 30 different proposals that you are invited to analyze, one after the other.

Underneath each idea it says “strongly disagree,” “disagree,” “agree,” “strongly agree,” etc. It feels like one of those online questionnaires you’ve seen many times before.

At the bottom of the form, you are invited to highlight the five proposals you care about most. Every citizen in your country on voting day would be looking at the same list and doing what you are doing in the voting booth: rating and ranking proposals. The goal is to establish a list of shared priorities.

The process looks like a referendum, a process you might’ve participated in before. But where a referendum asks you for a straight yes or no answer to a certain question, this new process — this preferendum — has a much richer interface for indicating your policy preferences. You get to translate your individual preferences into the collective priorities of your community.

Of course, you would’ve been able to see the list of proposals before. You would know it had not been defined by government officials or competing political parties, but by a random sample of citizens who had been working on it for months. You would know, too, that this random group of citizens had been given a mandate by the government to draft proposals as they saw fit.

More here.

Daniel Bessner in Boston Review:

Americans live in a very limited democracy. I don’t tell the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates; I don’t decide where the government puts my money; and I sure as hell didn’t vote to go to war in Iraq. Many of the most consequential decisions lie outside the purview of ordinary Americans, who have few means by which to make their voices heard in the corridors of power. This is by design. As numerous historians have shown, in the twentieth century’s second half U.S. elites constructed a state that intentionally restricts the ability of ordinary people to shape policy. Though they might disagree about a lot, the powerful in both political parties agree that, on most things, the public cannot be trusted.

This attitude is especially entrenched when it comes to foreign policy. Since World War II, elites have insisted that U.S. foreign affairs are simply too complex, and the public too volatile and too ignorant, for average Americans to have a say in its formation. As political scientist Gabriel Almond declared in 1950, “the gravest general problem confronting policy-makers is that of the instability of mass moods,” which made it very difficult to promote a stable foreign policy. Moreover, as Almond clarified several years later, when it came to world affairs “often the public is apathetic when it should be concerned, and panicky when it should be calm.” For Almond and many who came after him, a public-directed foreign policy was guaranteed to be a foolish and ineffective one.

More here.

Max Krahé in Phenomenal World:

The Triumph of Broken Promises by Fritz Bartel is a new history of the end of the Cold War. Challenging conventional narratives that focus on Reagan’s military-ideological assertiveness or Gorbachev’s openness to reform, the book gives a material and structural explanation of Western victory and Eastern defeat.¹ This makes for fascinating history: finance and energy emerge as silent but vital battlegrounds, unlikely connections—like those between Japanese investors and Hungarian central bankers—come to the fore, and several East-West similarities surprise the reader.

More than just fascinating history, however, the book makes a profound theoretical contribution. It demonstrates the importance of two institutional features of democratic capitalism, which state socialism lacked: the polity-economy distinction and competitive elections. It also highlights the importance of neoliberal ideology, providing certain Western policymakers with a framework to justify and even praise the unraveling of social democratic Keynesianism, while Eastern leaders struggled in vain to legitimize a similar turn to austerity within state socialism.

These features help explain why the West won the Cold War, and why this victory coincided with–and was in part fueled by—the rise of neoliberalism. In tracing their impact, the book also speaks to a set of wider questions: what is the nature of capitalism’s recent crises? What are the implications for progressive politics today? And is capitalism vs. socialism even the most useful framework for discussing these questions?

More here.

Fiona Sturges in The Guardian:

In the US comic Amy Schumer’s sketch Last Fuckable Day, Schumer is out walking when she comes across a picnic. There, three actors – Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Tina Fey and Patricia Arquette – are celebrating Louis-Dreyfus’s last day of being “believably fuckable” in the eyes of the entertainment industry. “If you shoot a sex scene the night before your birthday everyone’s, like, ‘Hurry up, hurry up, we’ve got to get it before midnight’ because they think your vagina is going to turn into a hermit crab’,” Fey tells Schumer.

I kept thinking of this while reading Hags, Victoria Smith’s account of the way older women are treated by a society that deems them unsightly and past their sell-by date. In discussing the precedents and structures behind this unholy collision of ageism and misogyny, the book draws on Snow White, the Malleus Maleficarum (a German treatise on witchcraft), Fatal Attraction (featuring Glenn Close’s fabled “bunny boiler”) plus the work of feminist theorists and campaigners such as Andrea Dworkin, Adrienne Rich and Gloria Steinem. From “Karens” (the entitled middle-aged complainers demanding to see the manager) to witches (read: sexless, embittered, ugly), Smith examines the thriving stereotypes used to sideline and vilify older women, often by young people who call themselves feminists. She recalls the New Yorker cartoon depicting a Puritan delivering a speech as a woman is about to be burned as a witch. “Let me start by saying no one is a bigger feminist than me,” he says.

More here.

Kerri Greenidge in The New York Times:

It’s a testament to Black endurance and brilliance that the little girl called Phillis Wheatley became, within 12 years of her arrival in Boston, the most significant African American poet of the 18th century. Yet, as the historian David Waldstreicher shows in “The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley,” his thoroughly researched, beautifully rendered and cogently argued biography, Wheatley is brilliant not merely because she survived and composed some of the most important works of trans-Atlantic literature. Rather, Waldstreicher insists, Wheatley was a supremely gifted neoclassical practitioner of language, an “organic intellectual of the enslaved.”

…Waldstreicher asks us to appreciate the sarcasm in Wheatley’s lines. He suggests that she was well acquainted with a trans-Atlantic Methodism that deemed an “abominable hypocrisy” the widely accepted notion of the slave trade as a path for Africans to salvation. In her poem, Wheatley doesn’t reinforce the notion of African inferiority; she challenges it. This is apparent in the final two couplets: “Some view our sable race with scornful eye,/‘Their colour is a diabolic die.’/Remember, Christians, Negroes, black as Cain,/May be refin’d, and join th’ angelic train.” These couplets, Waldstreicher argues, are “the real point, set up by the first four lines that seem to bathe enslavement in evangelical glory, something white folks might want to believe.”

In portraying Wheatley as an often subversive artist who understands and talks back to the racial assumptions of her time, Waldstreicher refuses to take the white Wheatleys at their word.

More here.

Mary Ann Gwinn at the LA Times:

John Muir and Robert Underwood Johnson were unlikely allies in the war to preserve Yosemite. Muir, son of a Scripture-quoting Scottish immigrant father, was raised poor on a Wisconsin farm, but he wrote and spoke with the fervor of a prophet, and his craggy visage, tough constitution and unshakable devotion to the natural world drew admirers like a magnet. The urbane and cultured Johnson was an insider with a vast network of contacts in publishing and politics. The editor of one of the country’s preeminent magazines, Johnson hosted New York literary salons, mingled with America’s elite and eventually became the U.S. ambassador to Italy.

It was improbable that they even met — Muir was on the West Coast, Johnson on the East.

more here.