Devorah Baum in The White Review:

1. ‘It’s kind of crazy to shop at Target, watch Netflix, drive a Honda, and still have a husband.’

Marriage falls into a specific category of things I don’t want to think about because their meaning swells the more you do. Personally, socially, historically. And yet, I am always interested in love stories: I listen to my friends talk about their love lives and when they apologise for dwelling on something – ‘is this boring?!’ – I answer, ‘love is the subject.’ I am interested in how we organise our lives by connection with other people, in how we live alongside others, in how love is a social construct and a form of relation. Love is the subject, by which I mean, love is something we want to narrate and discuss, because words make this inexplicable and incomprehensible thing – other people – feel less ambiguous, perhaps closer to certainty.

I don’t mean to conflate marriage and love. Quite the opposite – it is marriage’s function as an organising logic that I fear, that I believe does not work for anyone (especially not women). When I speak of marriage, it is not love I think of, but power. I think about Phyllis Rose discussing this in the introduction to PARALLEL LIVES: FIVE VICTORIAN MARRIAGES (1983): ‘When we resign power or assume new power, we insist it is not happening and demand to be talked to about love. Perhaps that is what love is – the momentary or prolonged refusal to think of another person in terms of power.’ But power is impossible to sidestep. A page later: ‘Who can resist the thought that love is the ideological bone thrown to women to distract their attention from the powerlessness of their lives?’ 

More here.

Nathan Gardels at Noema:

The controversies of late over the perils and promise of generative AI have raised anew the philosophical question of where technological sovereignty ends and human autonomy begins. Will the super-intelligent capacities of the putative servant we have invented end up being our actual master?

“The fact is that the powers which seem to use and govern technology are in reality more or less unwittingly used and governed by it,” Giorgio Agamben, the philosopher of biopolitics, observed in his presentation to the opening symposium of the Berggruen Institute Europe in Venice. “Both totalitarian and democratic regimes share the same incapability to govern technology, and both end up transforming themselves through the technologies they believed they were using for their own purposes. Why does it seem so hard and even impossible to govern technology?” he asked.

more here.

Yoni Freedhoff in Time:

Imagine a new medication was developed that not only provided meaningful improvement for the debilitating chronic condition it’s prescribed, but also helps to treat and prevent a myriad of other serious diseases. Imagine this same drug markedly improved a person’s quality of life with noted reductions in pain and improvements in mobility along with increases in confidence and mood. Now imagine that the media and medical coverage of its release are almost uniformly negative or sensationalistic.

This is precisely what has happened with the new generation of anti-obesity medications, that began with Wegovy/Ozempic and with many more rapidly on their way. Currently approved medications lead people with obesity to lose on average 15% of their body weight which in turn has dramatic benefits for multiple weight responsive medical conditions, including diabetes, high blood pressure, sleep apnea, GERD, fatty liver disease, and more. Clinical trials of newer molecules demonstrate even greater losses with the most recent, for Retatrutide, demonstrating a 24% body weight loss after 48 weeks of use and where weight in those participants appeared to still be dropping. Sustained weight loss has been shown to decrease the risk of developing those same conditions as well as some of our most common cancers including breast, uterine, and colon.

More here.

anyone lived in a pretty how town
(with up so floating many bells down)
spring summer autumn winter
he sang his didn’t he danced his did

Women and men (both little and small)
cared for anyone not at all
they sowed their isn’t they reaped their same
sun moon stars rain

children guessed (but only a few
and down they forgot as up they grew
autumn winter spring summer)
that noone loved him more by more

when by now and tree by leaf
she laughed his joy she cried his grief
bird by snow and stir by still
anyone’s any was all to her

someones married their everyones
laughed their cryings and did their dance
(sleep wake hope and then) they
said their nevers and slept their dream

stars rain sun moon
(and only the snow can begin to explain
how children are apt to forget to remember
with up so floating many bells down)

one day anyone died i guess
(and noone stooped to kiss his face)
busy folk buried them side by side
little by little and was by was

all by all and deep by deep
and more by more they dream their sleep
noone and anyone earth by april
wish by spirit and if by yes.

Women and men (both dong and ding)
summer autumn winter spring
reaped their sowing and went their came
sun moon stars rain

by e.e.cummings
from 50 poems
Hawthorne Books, 1940

Andrew Martin in The Guardian:

This book contains few new interviews about the “insanely productive” group who sold more than 220m records: it is author-led, meaning we are mainly given Bob Stanley’s opinions about the Bee Gees’ music. But there are few people whose opinions I would rather have. Stanley is a highly articulate proponent of pop rather than rock (his previous book was Let’s Do It: The Birth of Pop) and a practitioner himself, with his group Saint Etienne.

Pop has come in out of the cold in recent years, Blondie as likely to be pontificated about as Led Zeppelin, but the Bee Gees – who were certainly “pop”, despite evolving through quasi-psychedelia into R&B and disco – remain, as Stanley writes, “othered”, rarely accorded the respect they deserve. And he suggests that such praise as they do receive tends to be conditional: “It’s the Bee Gees… but it’s really good.”

More here.

Huw Price and Ken Wharton in Aeon:

Almost a century ago, physics produced a problem child, astonishingly successful yet profoundly puzzling. Now, just in time for its 100th birthday, we think we’ve found a simple diagnosis of its central eccentricity.

This weird wunderkind was ‘quantum mechanics’ (QM), a new theory of how matter and light behave at the submicroscopic level. Through the 1920s, QM’s components were assembled by physicists such as Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrödinger. Alongside Albert Einstein’s relativity theory, it became one of the two great pillars of modern physics.

The pioneers of QM realised that the new world they had discovered was very strange indeed, compared with the classical (pre-quantum) physics they had all learned at school. These days, this strangeness is familiar to physicists, and increasingly useful for technologies such as quantum computing.

The strangeness has a name – it’s called entanglement – but it is still poorly understood. Why does the quantum world behave this strange way? We think we’ve solved a central piece of this puzzle.

More here.

Noah Smith in Noahpinion:

A lot of people — at least, a lot of people who read this blog — know of Matt Yglesias’ book One Billion Americans. It’s good, you should read it. But not as many seem to know that it’s actually a riff on a book that came out three years earlier called Maximum Canada: Why 35 Million Canadians Are Not Enough, by Doug Saunders. In fact, the books are pretty different; Saunders spends most of his time justifying the idea of a bigger Canada with appeals to the country’s history, culture, and politics, where Yglesias mostly discusses the practical details of how we’d fit the newcomers into the country.

But what these two books share is that they’re both advocating a certain type of nation-building strategy — the idea of deliberately promoting large-scale immigration in order to expand a country’s population toward a numerical target. This isn’t something the U.S. has really done in the past.

More here.

Todd Cronan at nonsite:

According to Kenner, the Hollow Men provides the first expression of the “structural principle” of Eliot’s later work and, I would suggest, of Kenner’s work as well. What is that principle? Eliot’s aim is to articulate “moral states which to an external observer are indistinguishable from one another” (IP, 163). So that we can “judge a man’s action,” Kenner says, but “we cannot judge the man by his actions.” What Kenner calls “distinct actions,” occlude from the observer the nature of a man’s true actions. And since what we are asked to judge are “moral states,” it naturally follows that we are not meant to judge works of art, which is exactly what Kenner says (IP, 163). “In art,” Kenner writes, “actions are determined by their objects.” In morals, by contrast, actions are “determined by their motives, which are hidden: hidden, often, from the actor” (IP, 163). The art that Kenner admires is anti-art in the sense that conventional artworks are construed as the expression of distinct actions, a kind of action we sometimes define as intentional tout court.

more here.

Natalia Mesa in The Scientist:

Tasmanian devil populations have dwindled in recent decades due to two contagious facial cancers that cause debilitating growths. Now, alongside an international group of scientists and organizations, researchers from University of Cambridge conducted a large genetic sequencing study published in Science, and found that one of those cancers is evolving at an alarming pace and may pose a grave threat to Tasmania’s top carnivore.¹ This study is the first to track the evolution of the two cancers, creating a detailed account of when the cancers arose, how they spread across the landscape, and importantly, which mutations helped them spread over time.

Carolyn Hogg, a biologist at the University of Sydney who was not involved in the study, said that the research team has generated useful tools to study the devils. “You can make massive headway into understanding how the species [and] disease move through the landscape, and how the disease mutates and changes,” with genomic data, she said.

Devilish diseases

Tasmanian devils are the world’s largest carnivorous marsupials, native to only Tasmania, an island off the coast of southeast Australia. For more than 30 years, these marsupials have been battling two deadly facial cancers, devil facial tumor 1 (DFT1) and devil facial tumor 2 (DFT2). A unique feature of these cancers is that they primarily spread through biting, a common occurrence in devils during fights over mates and food. Transmissible tumors are exceedingly rare in nature, making the devils important models for studying cancer evolution.

More here.

Karen Bakker at Noema:

For millennia, the movements of the celestial bodies in the heavens above, from shining planets to the faintest of stars, have provided practical guidance to navigators and spiritual direction to oracles. But some signals created by the stars are invisible to the naked human eye.

Astrophysicists have developed techniques to convert data from light signals into digital audio, using pitch, duration and other properties of sound. Wanda Díaz-Merced, a blind astronomer, sonifies plasma patterns in the upper reaches of the Earth’s atmosphere and invented new methods to detect subtle signals in the presence of visual noise. But the conversion of data into acoustic signals — called sonification — is now being used by scientists who are not vision-impaired because listening to the stars helps detect patterns that may be missed by visual representations.

more here.

August 15

Today Jeremy turns 16. We were living in England when
he was born, and we gave him three names — Jeremy for a
liberal politician we admired, David for his father, and Owen
for Wilfred Owen, a World War 1 poet who died Battle. The
first two names would have been enough.
…… For the past few weeks we’ve been practicing his driving
over at the cemetery, where to roads are quiet. Mr. Tanzi has
a natural bolder for a gravestone. I told Jeremy I’d like
something along that line, and he shifted gears. It’s strange
having a child in the driver’s seat, but I don’t get as nervous as
I thought I would. Jeremy’s careful. The other day he passed
through the cemetery gate and onto a living road.

by Nancy Lagomarsino
from The Secretary Parables
Alice James Books, 1991

Ross Benjamin in Aeon:

On 9 October 1911, Franz Kafka, then 28 years old, wrote in his diary that he didn’t expect to reach the age of 40. At the time of this entry, he was not yet stricken with the tuberculosis that would lead to his death in 1924, shortly before his 41st birthday. What afflicted him at that time, making him doubt his longevity, was harder to pin down. Perhaps due to this very indefiniteness, it provided raw material for his aesthetic imagination:

I’ll hardly live to be forty years old, against that prospect speaks, for example, the tension that often lies over the left half of my skull, which feels like an inner leprosy and which, when I disregard the unpleasantness and try only to contemplate it, makes the same impression on me as the sight of the skull cross sections in textbooks or as an almost painless dissection while alive, where the knife a little bit cooling, careful, often stopping and turning back, sometimes lying at rest slices paper-thin coverings into even finer divisions very close to working brain parts.
– from The Diaries by Franz Kafka. This and subsequent translations by Ross Benjamin (2022).

The literary intensity with which Kafka portrayed his sense of physical malady is characteristic of his writing in his diaries, which he kept between 1909 and 1923; they offer an intimate glimpse into the transformative process by which he made even his most probing self-examination and his most agonising ordeals into a fertile source of invention.

More here.

Sean Carroll at Preposterous Universe:

Last year’s Nobel Prize for experimental tests of Bell’s Theorem was the first Nobel in the foundations of quantum mechanics since Max Born in 1954. Quantum foundations is enjoying a bit of a resurgence, inspired in part by improving quantum technology but also by a realization that understanding quantum mechanics might help with other problems in physics (and be important in its own right). Tim Maudlin is a leading philosopher of physics and also a skeptic of the Everett interpretation. We discuss the logic behind hidden-variable approaches such as Bohmian mechanics, and also the broader question of the importance of the foundations of physics.

More here.

Kelsey Piper in Asterisk:

It’d be a mistake to characterize the risk of human extinction from artificial intelligence as a “fringe” concern now hitting the mainstream, or a decoy to distract from current harms caused by AI systems. Alan Turing, one of the fathers of modern computing, famously wrote in 1951 that “once the machine thinking method had started, it would not take long to outstrip our feeble powers. … At some stage therefore we should have to expect the machines to take control.” His colleague I. J. Good agreed; more recently, so did Stephen Hawking. When today’s luminaries warn of “extinction risk” from artificial intelligence, they are in good company, restating a worry that has been around as long as computers. These concerns predate the founding of any of the current labs building frontier AI, and the historical trajectory of these concerns is important to making sense of our present-day situation. To the extent that frontier labs do focus on safety, it is in large part due to advocacy by researchers who do not hold any financial stake in AI. Indeed, some of them would prefer AI didn’t exist at all.

But while the risk of human extinction from powerful AI systems is a long-standing concern and not a fringe one, the field of trying to figure out how to solve that problem was until very recently a fringe field, and that fact is profoundly important to understanding the landscape of AI safety work today.

More here.

Davide Castelvecchi in Nature:

Gravitational waves are back, and they’re bigger than ever.

After the historic first detection of the space-time rattles in 2015 using ground-based detectors, researchers could have now rediscovered Albert Einstein’s waves with an entirely different technique. The approach tracks changes in the distances between Earth and beacon stars in its Galactic neighbourhood called pulsars, which reveal how the space in between is stretched and squeezed by the passage of gravitational waves.

Whereas the original discovery spotted waves originating from the collision and merger of two star-sized black holes, the most likely source of the latest finding is the combined signal from many pairs of much larger black holes — millions or even billions of times the mass of the Sun — slowly orbiting each other in the hearts of distant galaxies. These waves are thousands of times stronger and longer than those found in 2015, with wavelengths of up to tens of light years. By contrast, the ripples detected since 2015 using a technique called interferometry are just tens or hundreds of kilometres long.

More here.

Andrew Zolli & Ann Marie Healy in Delancey Place:

The internet was created by the U.S. military as a way to preserve communications to missile silos in the event of a Soviet nuclear attack:

“From its inception as a U.S. military funded project in the 1960s, the Internet was designed to solve a particular problem above all else: to ensure the continuity of communications in the face of disaster. Military leaders at the time were concerned that a preemp­tive nuclear attack by the Soviets on U.S. telecommunications hubs could disrupt the chain of command — and that their own counterstrike orders might never make it from their command bunkers to their in­tended recipients in the missile silos of North Dakota. So they asked the Internet’s original engineers to design a system that could sense and automatically divert traffic around the inevitable equipment failures that would accompany any such attack.

“The Internet achieves this feat in a simple yet ingenious way: It breaks up every email, web page, and video we transmit into packets of information and forwards them through a labyrinthine network of routers — specialized network computers that are typically redundantly connected to more than one other node on the network. Each router contains a regularly updated routing table, similar to a local train sched­ule. When a packet of data arrives at a router, this table is consulted and the packet is forwarded in the general direction of its destination. If the best pathway is blocked, congested, or damaged, the routing table is updated accordingly and the packet is diverted along an alternative path­way, where it will meet the next router in its journey, and the process will repeat. A packet containing a typical web search may traverse dozens of Internet routers and links — and be diverted away from multiple conges­tion points or offline computers — on the seemingly instantaneous trip between your computer and your favorite website.

More here.