Singularity

Do you sometimes want to wake up to the singularity
we once were?

so compact nobody
needed a bed, or food or money—

nobody hiding in the school bathroom
or home alone

pulling open the drawer
where the pills are kept.

For every atom belonging to me as good
Belongs to you.   Remember?
There was no   Nature.    No
them.   No tests
to determine if the elephant
grieves her calf    or if

the coral reef feels pain.    Trashed
oceans don’t speak English or Farsi or French;

would that we could wake up  to what we were
—when we were ocean    and before that
to when sky was earth, and animal was energy, and rock was
liquid and stars were space and space was not

at all—nothing

before we came to believe humans were so important
before this awful loneliness.

Can molecules recall it?
what once was?    before anything happened?

No I, no We, no one. No was
No verb      no noun
only a tiny tiny dot brimming with

is is is is is

All   everything   home

Marie Howe
from Poets.org

Andrew Dean in the Sydney Review of Books:

Compare the following two paragraphs. One is a mission statement for a university in regional Australia. The other is generated by AI from the prompt ‘write a mission statement for university based in Australia, with a regional focus’.

1. 1. Our innovation and excellence in both education and research generate ideas that transform lives and communities. We will be the region’s most progressive and responsive university, leading in blending digital capability with our distinctive campus precincts. We will leverage strong partnerships to maximise the social, cultural and economic impact we deliver regionally, nationally, and globally.
   2. Our university is dedicated to providing quality education with a regional focus. We strive to prepare our students to become responsible citizens who positively impact their communities, while also fostering a sense of global awareness. Our goal is to produce graduates who are well-rounded, critical thinkers with the skills necessary to succeed in an ever-changing world.

Which was written by AI, and which by humans?

More here.

Emily Conover in Science News:

A 13-sided shape known as “the hat” has mathematicians tipping their caps.

It’s the first true example of an “einstein,” a single shape that forms a special tiling of a plane: Like bathroom floor tile, it can cover an entire surface with no gaps or overlaps but only with a pattern that never repeats.

“Everybody is astonished and is delighted, both,” says mathematician Marjorie Senechal of Smith College in Northampton, Mass., who was not involved with the discovery. Mathematicians had been searching for such a shape for half a century. “It wasn’t even clear that such a thing could exist,” Senechal says.

Although the name “einstein” conjures up the iconic physicist, it comes from the German ein Stein, meaning “one stone,” referring to the single tile.

More here.

Will Holub-Moorman in the Boston Review:

The specter of parental neglect no longer orders U.S. politics as it did in the late twentieth century. But as indispensable recent books by sociologists Lynne Haney and Dorothy Roberts demonstrate, the knotty legal infrastructures and punitive policies inspired by this rhetoric have endured, with devastating consequences for poor families. These books focus on different areas of U.S. family policy—Haney writes about child support enforcement, Roberts about child protective services—but together they expose the state’s massive and creeping apparatus for surveilling and disciplining parents.

Through extensive interviews and firsthand observation of family courts, both authors show how parents are subjected to an array of humiliating burdens at the ever-blurrier boundaries between the welfare state and the criminal justice system.

More here.

Sam Leith in The Guardian:

David Baddiel was six years old when his mother told him death was like a long sleep from which you never wake up. “I think from that point,” he says, “I never really wanted to go to sleep again.” That night, he lay on the top bunk of his bed, fervently praying – “probably” the first and last time he has prayed with any sincerity – that “my life as it was in Dollis Hill in 1971 would still somehow continue after death”.

More than half a century later Baddiel is still an insomniac, and he’s still terrified by the prospect of dying. “I don’t quite believe anyone who says they’re not,” he says. That childhood memory, and that conviction, is what kicks off his latest book, The God Desire, which delivers in a brisk 110-odd pages what Baddiel considers “an absolutely slam-dunk argument” against the existence of God.

More here.

Some Days

I put the people in their places at the table,
bend their legs at the knees,
if they come with that feature,
and fix them into tiny wooden chairs.

All afternoon they face one another,
the man in the brown suit,
the woman in the blue dress,
perfectly motionless, perfectly behaved.

But other days, I am the one
who is lifted up by the ribs,
then lowered into the dining room of a dollhouse
to sit with the others at the long table.

Very funny,
but how would you like it
if you never knew from one day to the next
if you were going to spend it

striding around like a vivid god,
or sitting down there amidst the wallpaper,
staring straight ahead with your little plastic face?

by Billy Colllins
from Sailing Alone Around the Room
Random House, 21002

Lisa Niven-Phillips in Vogue:

From Matt Hancock’s WhatsApp messages to Ariana DeBose’s viral BAFTAs rap, there are certain topics you just can’t avoid if you spend any significant amount of time online. One of the most oft-discussed subjects of recent months? The irrepressible rise of semaglutide medications. A class of injectable drugs which work to suppress appetite and slow down digestion by replicating hormones produced naturally within the body, semaglutide medications such as Ozempic and Wegovy can control high blood sugar in people with type 2 diabetes, as well as facilitating weight loss in those with obesity. But, perhaps unsurprisingly in a culture which places thinness on a pedestal, this ability to help users shed pounds rapidly has piqued the interest of those beyond just the patients it was initially intended to treat. And with the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) having just approved Wegovy for use in the UK specifically as a weight loss aid, the conversation looks set to get more complicated still.

More here.

Jonathan Rée and Thomas Jones in the LRB:

Long before Margaret Thatcher told her cabinet that The Constitution of Liberty was “what we believe”, neoliberal poster boy Friedrich Hayek had been denounced by his mentor as a socialist. Following his review of a new biography, Jonathan Rée speaks to Tom about Hayek’s celebrity and infamy, and the ways close reading reveals surprising nuance in his work.

More here.

Kate Aronoff in The New Republic:

Five hours into the hearing in Marshall, Texas, moods were devolving fast. “I’ve got rural folks that are sick of seeing solar farms going up on every good piece of ranchland,” growled Texas state Senator Brian Birdwell, hunched over a long wooden dais. Like most of his colleagues, he was gray-haired, drab-suited, ill-humored. Filtering in through a row of tall windows at Birdwell’s back, the December light did little to brighten the atmosphere. “Maybe that’s why we’re gonna be eating insects instead, cause there’s nowhere for the cattle to graze.”

The Texas state Senate State Affairs Committee was considering neither alternative protein sources nor land use. Birdwell and his colleagues were gathered at the Old Harrison County Courthouse to determine whether the asset managers they’d summoned before them—gargantuan companies charged with profitably investing trillions of dollars on behalf of their clients, including the state of Texas—were complying with the demands of a bizarre new law. Passed in 2021, Senate Bill 13 requires Texas to cut off business ties to financial firms deemed to be boycotting energy companies for ideological reasons. The law was just one front in a proxy battle between the Republican Party and three letters newly in its crosshairs: ESG.

The acronym, which stands for “environmental, social, governance,” refers to criteria investors use to determine the impact potential investments may have on the world, as well as calculate how events in the world may affect investments. It can describe financial products crafted to perform well according to those criteria, or strategies corporations adopt to do so. While its meaning is nothing if not fuzzy, the term is often shorthand for climate- and socially conscious investment.

More here.

James K. Galbraith in The Nation:

When Silicon Valley Bank went down, many progressives, and much of the media, immediately pointed to malfeasance, special pleading and regulatory failures—a conditioned response with a strong pedigree. But if those were the real causes, then SVB (and Signature, and First Republic) would have been isolated cases. It’s clear now that they were not. A systemic crisis is unfolding—with a systemic cause.

The business model of SVB consisted of an attractive return on deposits, adventurous loans mainly to young companies in the tech sector, perks for big clients to keep their funds in the bank, and large investments in government bonds and mortgage-backed securities. The safety of the bonds worked to offset the risk of the loans, while the bonds’ return covered the cost of deposits—which grew rapidly as client companies and some cash-rich individuals parked their funds at the bank.

SVB’s growth was indeed rapid, but much of that was back in 2021, the pandemic recovery year. The return on deposits was sweet, and the ad said, in a way that is not now reassuring, that SVB is “fundamentally different from other banks.” It’s also true that SVB lobbied successfully for relief from some regulations on the ground that it did not pose a systemic risk. That looks bad, but SVB wasn’t a systemic risk—its peak deposits of $300 billion were a tiny fraction of US bank deposits.

The bank (I was told by an investor) did not have staff—or possibly, business customers—sufficient to lend out the deposits it attracted to the degree usual for larger banks. Hence much of its balance sheet simply converted short-term deposits into long-term securities, which formed about three-fourths of SVB’s portfolio. This—and not problems with loans—brought SVB to grief. By usual indicators (such as late payments or defaults), the loan book was in very good shape—for the moment.

More here.

Max Gallien and Giovanni Occhiali in Sidecar:

For most of modern history, cannabis has primarily been produced in lower income countries for consumption in Europe and North America. Its provenance has shaped the way we speak about it: ‘kush’ stems from the Hindu Kush mountain range in South Asia, ‘reefer’ may refer to the Rif mountains in Morocco, while strains like ‘Malawi gold’ and ‘Panama red’ directly advertise their origins. In recent years, the wave of cannabis legalization has raised hopes of redressing this imbalance. Following higher income countries like the US, Canada and Germany, traditional production countries such as Malawi, Mexico, Colombia and Morocco have begun to update their cannabis laws: aiming to give legal producers a fair cut for their crops, so that profits no longer flow to organised crime via illegal exports and sales. However, it seems increasingly likely that as the cannabis market legalizes and formalizes, it will reproduce many of the same symptoms as its forerunner, with traditional producers again finding profits located elsewhere – this time primarily with formal firms in high income countries. Understanding these problems means interrogating the reciprocal process by which policy makes markets and markets make policy.

While legalization has taken different shapes across higher income countries, it has typically had a common feature: it has not created structures for the import of recreational cannabis.

More here.

Lara Feigel at The Guardian:

Postwar Italian neorealism was one of the most exciting literary movements of the 20th century, but it’s only recently that the female neorealists have had the attention they deserve. In 2018, the publisher Daunt began its vital championing of Natalia Ginzburg, and now Pushkin brings us Alba de Céspedes. These women were famous in their lifetimes but have been forgotten since, and I think we owe their rediscovery to our own need for a reinvigorated realist novel during a moment almost as crisis-laden as Italy in the 1940s.

It’s telling that many of today’s most sophisticated realists, Rachel Cusk and Sally Rooney among them, have been crucial in championing Ginzburg. And it’s no coincidence that all this began with Ferrante fever. Elena Ferrante herself owes so much to neorealism, and it’s she who has driven the rediscovery of Céspedes.

more here.

Jennifer Wilson at the NYT:

On Sept. 29 and 30, 1941, in a ravine just outside Kyiv called Babyn Yar (“Babi Yar” in Russian), Nazis executed nearly 34,000 Jews over the course of 36 hours. It was the deadliest mass execution in what came to be known as the “Holocaust by Bullets.” We were never supposed to know it happened. In 1943, as the Nazis fled Kyiv, they ordered the bodies in Babyn Yar to be dug up and burned, to erase all memory of what they’d done.

The Nazis planned to kill the workers they tasked with destroying the bodies. “But they didn’t succeed,” one declared proudly. The Ukrainian filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa included newsreel footage in his documentary “Babi Yar. Context” (2021) of one of the men giving an interview. He and 12 others (out of 300) escaped “and can now testify,” he tells the camera, “to the whole world and our motherland to the acts of barbarity committed by those fascist dogs in our beloved Kyiv.”

more here.

Natalia Mesa in The Scientist:

Without the trillions of bacteria in the gut, muscles might not be able to knit themselves back together after an injury. According to a study published February 22 in Immunity, T cells that normally reside in the mouse colon play a crucial role in tissue regeneration—and rely on gut microbes to do so. Without these helpful microbes, the study suggests, inflammation could get out of control, preventing healing and causing fibrosis. “The main message of the paper is that the microbiota is influencing your immune system and your general health in a way larger way than we appreciated before,” says Bola Hanna, an immunologist at Harvard Medical School. Hanna studies regulatory T cells, a class of immune cells found in tissues throughout the body. He describes regulatory T cells as the “peacekeepers” of the immune system because they rein in other immune cells, ensuring inflammation doesn’t get out of control.

“To find that immune cell populations that are modified [in the gut] . . . have systemic effects and influence physiological and pathophysiological processes that occur elsewhere is obviously of major interest,” says Alexander Rudensky, an immunologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center who was not involved in the study. “It sets the stage to explore further other aspects of physiology that can be affected by the cells generated in the intestine.”

More here.