Steven Johnson in The New York Times:

It was said that Thomas Midgley Jr. had the finest lawn in America. Golf-club chairmen from across the Midwest would visit his estate on the outskirts of Columbus, Ohio, purely to admire the grounds; the Scott Seed Company eventually put an image of Midgley’s lawn on its letterhead. Midgley cultivated his acres of grass with the same compulsive innovation that characterized his entire career. He installed a wind gauge on the roof that would sound an alarm in his bedroom, alerting him whenever the lawn risked being desiccated by a breeze. Fifty years before the arrival of smart-home devices, Midgley wired up the rotary telephone in his bedroom so that a few spins of the dial would operate the sprinklers.

In the fall of 1940, at age 51, Midgley contracted polio, and the dashing, charismatic inventor soon found himself in a wheelchair, paralyzed from the waist down. At first he took on his disability with the same ingenuity that he applied to maintaining his legendary lawn, analyzing the problem and devising a novel solution to it — in this case, a mechanized harness with pulleys attached to his bed, allowing him to clamber into his wheelchair each morning without assistance. At the time, the contraption seemed emblematic of everything Midgley had stood for in his career as an inventor: determined, innovative thinking that took on a seemingly intractable challenge and somehow found a way around it.

Or at least it seemed like that until the morning of Nov. 2, 1944, when Midgley was found dead in his bedroom. The public was told he had been accidentally strangled to death by his own invention. Privately, his death was ruled a suicide. Either way, the machine he designed had become the instrument of his death.

More here.

Mario Saraceni in Aeon:

English may have become universal, but not everyone believes it is a gift. In fact, many hold diametrically opposite views. In an article in The Guardian in 2018, the journalist Jacob Mikanowski described English as a ‘behemoth, bully, loudmouth, thief’, highlighting that the dominance of English threatens local cultures and languages. Due to the ways in which English continues to gain ground worldwide, many languages are becoming endangered or extinct. This not only impacts relatively small languages like Welsh or Irish, but also larger languages, such as Yoruba in Nigeria, which are pressured by English in business, trade, education, the media and technology.

For this reason, a number of scholars in the field of sociolinguistics consider English a killer language and have described it as a kind of monster, like the deadly multi-headed Hydra from Greek mythology.

More here.

Stephen Ornes in Quanta:

Recent investigations like the one Dyer worked on have revealed that LLMs can produce hundreds of “emergent” abilities — tasks that big models can complete that smaller models can’t, many of which seem to have little to do with analyzing text. They range from multiplication to generating executable computer code to, apparently, decoding movies based on emojis. New analyses suggest that for some tasks and some models, there’s a threshold of complexity beyond which the functionality of the model skyrockets. (They also suggest a dark flip side: As they increase in complexity, some models reveal new biases and inaccuracies in their responses.)

“That language models can do these sort of things was never discussed in any literature that I’m aware of,” said Rishi Bommasani, a computer scientist at Stanford University. Last year, he helped compile a list of dozens of emergent behaviors, including several identified in Dyer’s project. That list continues to grow.

More here.

Alan Jacobs in The Hedgehog Review:

In a recent Substack post, free-range social critic Freddie deBoer asked, “Are smartphones to blame for the mental health crisis among teens?” He is far from alone in asking that, of course, but what he said next grabbed my attention:

The debate has picked up steam lately, in part because of the steady accumulation of evidence that they are indeed, at least partially…. Jonathan Haidt has done considerable work marshaling this evidence. But there’s an attendant question of how phones make kids miserable, if indeed they do.

The important issue, then, is what exactly smartphones are doing to teens that makes them so miserable? DeBoer’s answers are quite good—I especially welcome his emphasis on the misery of being constantly bombarded by images of lives none of us can actually live—but I think we can significantly deepen our understanding of these matters by turning to an account of human behavior offered by the philosopher David Hume nearly three centuries ago.

More here.

Judith L. Herman in Literary Hub:

The first precept of survivors’ justice is the desire for community acknowledgment that a wrong has been done. This makes intuitive sense. If secrecy and denial are the tyrant’s first line of defense, then public truth telling must be the first act of a survivor’s resistance, and recognizing the survivor’s claim to justice must be the moral community’s first act of solidarity.

The First Speakout on Rape, organized by New York Radical Feminists, took place in 1971. There, the public testimony of survivors created a new kind of open courtroom, one in which violence against women would no longer be considered a private misfortune but rather viewed as a criminal injustice that had long been invisible and tacitly condoned. In declaring their stories with righteous outrage rather than shame, survivors collectively challenged the wider community to recognize truths long hidden.

Fifty years later, when survivors organize, this remains their first demand.

More here.

Kamal Nahas in The Scientist:

Artificial intelligence algorithms have had a meteoric impact on protein structure, such as when DeepMind’s AlphaFold2 predicted the structures of 200 million proteins. Now, David Baker and his team of biochemists at the University of Washington have taken protein-folding AI a step further. In a Nature publication from February 22, they outlined how they used AI to design tailor-made, functional proteins that they could synthesize and produce in live cells, creating new opportunities for protein engineering. Ali Madani, founder and CEO of Profluent, a company that uses other AI technology to design proteins, says this study “went the distance” in protein design and remarks that we’re now witnessing “the burgeoning of a new field.”

Proteins are made up of different combinations of amino acids linked together in folded chains, producing a boundless variety of 3D shapes. Predicting a protein’s 3D structure based on its sequence alone is an impossible task for the human mind, owing to numerous factors that govern protein folding, such as the sequence and length of the biomolecule’s amino acids, how it interacts with other molecules, and the sugars added to its surface. Instead, scientists have determined protein structure for decades using experimental techniques such as X-ray crystallography, which can resolve protein folds in atomic detail by diffracting X-rays through crystallized protein. But such methods are expensive, time-consuming, and depend on skillful execution. Still, scientists using these techniques have managed to resolve thousands of protein structures, creating a wealth of data that could then be used to train AI algorithms to determine the structures of other proteins. DeepMind famously demonstrated that machine learning could predict a protein’s structure from its amino acid sequence with the AlphaFold system and then improved its accuracy by training AlphaFold2 on 170,000 protein structures.

More here.

Ross Douthat in The New York Times:

This week the conservative writer Bethany Mandel had the kind of moment that can happen to anyone who talks in public for a living: While promoting a new book critiquing progressivism, she was asked to define the term “woke” by an interviewer — a reasonable question, but one that made her brain freeze and her words stumble. The viral clip, in turn, yielded an outpouring of arguments about the word itself: Can it be usefully defined? Is it just a right-wing pejorative? Is there any universally accepted label for what it’s trying to describe? The answers are yes, sometimes and unfortunately no. Of course there is something real to be described: The revolution inside American liberalism is a crucial ideological transformation of our time. But unlike a case like “neoconservatism,” where a critical term was then accepted by the movement it described, our climate of ideological enmity makes settled nomenclature difficult.

I personally like the term “Great Awokening,” which evokes the new progressivism’s roots in Protestantism — but obviously secular progressives find it condescending. I appreciate how the ‌British writer Dan Hitchens acknowledges the difficulty of definitions by calling the new left-wing politics “the Thing” — but that’s unlikely to catch on with true believing Thingitarians. So let me try a different exercise — instead of a pithy term or definition, let me write a sketch of the “woke” worldview, elaborating its internal logic as if I myself believed in it. (To the incautious reader: These are not my actual beliefs.)

More here.

Concert in the Garden

It rained,
The hour is an enormous eye.
Inside it, we come and go like reflections,
The river of music
enters my blood.
If I say body, it answers wind.
If I say earth, it answers where?

The world, a double blossom, opens:
sadness at having come,
joy of being here.

I walk lost in my own center.

by Octavio Paz
from The Collected Poems 1957-1987
Carcanet Press Limited, 1988

Gardiner Means in Phenomenal World:

If they are remembered at all, the 1950s are now thought of as a lost golden age of stable growth and political economic consensus. But the second half of the decade saw rising prices, tightening financial conditions, diminished industrial employment, and stagnant investment. With knowledge of the turbulence that followed, historians have increasingly interpreted the economic history of the late 1950s not as a minor aberration to a stable political order but as revealing structural pathologies latent in the twentieth-century industrial economy. If contemporaries did not yet use the word “stagflation,” they might as well have, referring to the decade’s rising prices with terms such as “new inflation” and “recession-cum-inflation.”

Gardiner C. Means was one of the most astute analysts of the policy dilemma created by this anti-inflationary monetary policy. Means owed his original prominence to The Modern Corporation and Private Property, which he co-authored with Adolf Berle in 1932. This surprise best-seller popularized the idea that corporate capitalism—specifically, its tendency to separate ownership and management—represented a radical transformation in social organization. The book placed the question of corporate power on the agenda at the depths of the Great Depression, and Means parlayed this commercial and intellectual success into a position at the Department of Agriculture in the first Franklin Roosevelt administration. The New Deal’s response to that conjuncture was in part shaped by his distinctive analysis: the length and depth of the 1930s recession was, he argued, a consequence of an imbalance in relative prices between economic sectors—a diagnosis which prescribed national economic planning to raise agricultural prices and allow farmers to afford an expanded volume of industrial production.

Twenty-five years later, Means brought his familiarity with corporate pricing patterns to the distinctive problem of the postwar economy.

More here.

Pranab Bardhan in Boston Review:

Martin Wolf is one of the most influential economic journalists in the world today, and he is unhappy—to use his frequent metaphor in his new book, The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism—that the traditional marriage between capitalism and democracy in rich countries is on the rocks.

Wolf thinks that “democratic capitalism” is the best system for fostering general welfare. But it has begun to fray, he argues, because capitalism has not been productive enough for high growth, and widening inequality has generated widespread misery and distrust in the basic institutions of liberal democracy. While plutocrats hoard wealth and dismantle policies meant to promote inclusive prosperity, a segment of the middle and working classes have revolted by embracing ethno-nationalist demagogues with seductive but ultimately vacuous promises, who in turn are destroying due process and political rights. Wolf thinks that restoring a general sense of citizenship, with shared interest and loyalty to the common good, is the only way out, but he is not very hopeful that the United States will remain democratic by the end of this decade.

There are valuable lessons to be drawn from Wolf’s rich and nuanced analysis, but overall the book has some serious weaknesses in both diagnosis and prescription. He tends to underemphasize the cultural factors fueling the rise of right-wing populism, and his proposals for reform are too timidly and thinly conceived. Along with economic precarity, it is cultural status anxiety and resentment that may best explain the embrace of anti-democratic figures in high-income countries. This is not a reason to condone economic inequality—on the contrary, we should do far more than Wolf proposes to combat it—but it is a reason to doubt that democracy will be saved so long as capitalism prospers and economic gains are somewhat more equitably distributed.

More here.

Susan Neiman in Unherd:

It is 85 years since the great bluesman Lead Belly coined the phrase “stay woke” in “Scottsboro Boys”, a song dedicated to nine black teenagers whose execution for rapes they never committed was only prevented by years of international protests and the American Communist Party. Staying alive to injustice — what could be wrong with that? Apparently, quite a lot. In a few short decades, woke was transformed from a term of praise to a term of abuse. Still, the fact that politicians ranging from Ron DeSantis to Rishi Sunak deploy “woke” as a battle cry should not prevent us from examining its assumptions. For not only liberals, but many Leftists and socialists like me are increasingly uneasy with the form it has taken.

The woke discourse today is confusing because it appeals to emotions traditional to the Left: empathy for the marginalised, indignation at the plight of the oppressed, determination that historical wrongs can be righted. Those emotions, however, are derailed by a range of theoretical assumptions — usually expressed as self-evident truths — that ultimately undermine them.

Take a sentence the New York Times printed shortly after Biden’s election: “Despite Vice President Kamala D. Harris’s Indian roots, the Biden administration may prove less forgiving over Modi’s Hindu nationalist agenda.” If you read that quickly, you may miss the theoretical assumption: political views are determined by ethnic backgrounds. If you know nothing about contemporary India, you may miss the fact that the fiercest critics of Modi’s violent nationalism are themselves Indian.

More here.

Malcom Kyeyune in Compact Magazine:

As the American Civil War was raging, the famous Prussian strategist Helmuth von Moltke is said to have dismissed the whole affair as “two armed mobs” facing off, with few strategic lessons for sophisticated continental theorists of warfare like himself. The saying is likely apocryphal, but it has stuck around for the simple reason that it conveyed a deeper reality of the time. As the world slouched toward the cataclysm of World War I, many smaller wars were being fought that, each in their own way, offered a prelude of what was to come in 1914. From the American War Between the States all the way to the Russo-Japanese War, plenty of lessons were there to be learned—but nobody was all that interested in them.

The time we live in now bears more than a passing resemblance to those years leading up to the Great War. More and more hints of what might be coming are served up each year, but it’s an open question who is seriously paying attention. One such demonstration came this month when both Saudi Arabia and Iran sent delegates to Beijing. There, the two countries took the first steps on the path to ending their rivalry, long one of the fixtures of the Middle Eastern geopolitical playboard, and agreed to normalize diplomatic relations. As they did so, they made no secret about who had made this huge breakthrough possible: Chinese paramount leader Xi Jinping.

More here.

Madoc Cairns at The Guardian:

On Saturday 13 December 1958, the People’s Republic of China declared war on a bird. Mobilisation was total: 600 million enlisted for the fight. Their target was a tiny songbird, between five and six inches long: the Eurasian tree sparrow. It might seem like overkill, writes Stephen Moss in his history of human-avian relations, but in the eyes of China’s leaders the sparrows more than deserved it. An estimated 1.5m tonnes of grain disappeared down the gullets of said feathered gourmets each year. China was short on food – and short on patience. Peace was never an option.

Such extreme enmity, Moss reassures readers, is historically an exception, not a rule. Not that there’s much of a rule to be found in our millennia of coexistence – apart from how consistently we get birds wrong. Scavenging habits – and a certain native glamour – helped ravens coast into human mythologies as helpful companions across neolithic Eurasia.

more here.

Sexsmith the Dentist

Do you think that odes and sermons,
And ringing of church bells,
And the blood of old men and young men,
Martyred for the truth they saw
With eyes made bright by faith in God,
Accomplished the world’s great reformations?
Do you think that the Battle Hymn of the Republic
Would have been heard if the chattel slave
Had crowned the dominant dollar,
In spite of Whitney’s cotton gin,
And steam and rolling mills and iron
And telegraphs and white free labor?
Do you think that Daisy Fraser
Had been put out and driven out
If the canning works had never needed
Her little house and lot?
Or do you think the poker room
of Jonnie Taylor, or Burchard’s bar
Had been closed up if the money lost
And spent for beer had not been turned,
By closing them, to Thomas Rhodes
For larger sales of shoes and blankets,
And children’s cloaks and gold-oak cradles?
Why, a moral truth is a hollow truth
Which must be propped with gold.

by Edgar Lee Masters
from Spoon River Anthology
Collier Books 1962