Rani Neutill at the LARB:

As a scholar, I decided to bring my devotion to BTS to my research. Because of my growing fascination with this segment of BTS fandom and their love for the group, I interviewed 25 Gen-X women of diverse backgrounds who currently reside in the United States. Older women face enormous stigma for loving a “boy band,” and the seven Korean men of BTS are wholly different from the men many of us were taught to idealize. Women my age are rarely given the space to express desire, let alone lust, and I wanted to understand the contours and contexts of their experience.

What I heard were stories about how BTS has alleviated the sorrows that came from living through the pandemic as stay-at-home moms, remote workers, or unemployed women — women who feel that, once they pass the age of 40, they are no longer allowed to have desires. I found that BTS has been a catalyst for a collective reckoning among many Gen-X women about how the objects of their desires have been shaped by the media and how the freedom to desire has been foreclosed by age.

more here.

A. Machine

Of heaven, under the overpass and passed over,
The past is over and I’m over the past. My odometer

Is broken, can you help me? When you get this mess-
Age, I may be a half-ton crush, a half tone of mist

And mystery, maybe trooper bait with the ambulance
Ambling somewhere, or a dial of holy stations, a band-

Age of clamor and spooling, a dash and semaphore,
A pupil of motion on my way to be buried or planted or

Crammed or creamed, treading light and water or tread
and trepidation, maybe. Hey, I am backfiring along a road

Through the future, I am alive skidding on the tongue,
When you get this message, will you sigh, My lover is gone?

by Terrance Hayes
from The Academy of American Poets

Alex von Tunzelmann in The Guardian:

Are men and women naturally different, and do the roles socially assigned to us proceed from those differences? Refreshingly, science journalist and broadcaster Angela Saini begins her stirring interrogation of patriarchy by arguing that it is neither constant, inevitable nor unshakeable. “By thinking about gendered inequality as rooted in something unalterable within us, we fail to see it for what it is,” she writes, “something more fragile that has had to be constantly remade and reasserted.”

Anthropologists, political theorists, feminists and, importantly, patriarchs themselves have often reached across time and space to look for the origins of sex and gender division. In 1680, Sir Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha invoked ancient and biblical authorities as evidence that patriarchy (with the divine right of kings at its head) was natural and ordered by God. Even when later revolutionaries rejected the idea of a king as the head of a nation-family, they were reluctant to let go of elite male power. Thomas Jefferson wrote, creepily, that “the tender breasts of ladies were not formed for political convulsion”.

Friedrich Engels broke with this narrative when he claimed that the transition from ancient matriarchies to patriarchy represented “the world historical defeat of the female sex” – a calamity that reduced women to the status of property.

More here.

Oshan Jarow in Vox:

It didn’t take long for Microsoft’s new AI-infused search engine chatbot — codenamed “Sydney” — to display a growing list of discomforting behaviors after it was introduced early in February, with weird outbursts ranging from unrequited declarations of love to painting some users as “enemies.”

As human-like as some of those exchanges appeared, they probably weren’t the early stirrings of a conscious machine rattling its cage. Instead, Sydney’s outbursts reflect its programming, absorbing huge quantities of digitized language and parroting back what its users ask for. Which is to say, it reflects our online selves back to us. And that shouldn’t have been surprising — chatbots’ habit of mirroring us back to ourselves goes back way further than Sydney’s rumination on whether there is a meaning to being a Bing search engine. In fact, it’s been there since the introduction of the first notable chatbot almost 50 years ago.

In 1966, MIT computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum released ELIZA (named after the fictional Eliza Doolittle from George Bernard Shaw’s 1913 play Pygmalion), the first program that allowed some kind of plausible conversation between humans and machines. The process was simple: Modeled after the Rogerian style of psychotherapy, ELIZA would rephrase whatever speech input it was given in the form of a question. If you told it a conversation with your friend left you angry, it might ask, “Why do you feel angry?”

More here.

Christian Kriticos in Quillette:

Salman Rushdie found his voice in 1975. His first novel, Grimus, published earlier that year, had been ignored by the public and derided by the critics. At the same time, Rushdie was watching younger contemporaries such as Ian McEwan and Martin Amis cement their places among the British literary elite, while he remained saddled with his day job as an advertising copywriter.

Despite these setbacks, Rushdie still felt that he had a fresh, authentic literary voice to discover. He travelled back to his native India in search of it, knowing only that he wanted “to write a novel of childhood.” It was on this trip that he began to conceive Midnight’s Children, a novel he would write against the tradition of British literature set in India. While he admired some of these classic works, such as E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India, he took issue with the voice. The British style was cool and collected. The India that Rushdie knew was anything but. It was hot and “noisy and vulgar and crowded and sensual.” And it needed a voice to reflect that.

It was this unique migrant’s voice that catapulted Rushdie to literary stardom. His narrator in Midnight’s Children was loud and frenetic, reflecting not only the energy of a post-independence India, but also the magic-realist style that would become a trademark of his fiction.

More here.

Scott Aaronson in Shtetl-Optimized:

Given the new reality, and my full acknowledgment of the new reality, and my refusal to go down with the sinking ship of “AI will probably never do X and please stop being so impressed that it just did X”—many have wondered, why aren’t I much more terrified? Why am I still not fully on board with the Orthodox AI doom scenario, the Eliezer Yudkowsky one, the one where an unaligned AI will sooner or later (probably sooner) unleash self-replicating nanobots that turn us all to goo?

Is the answer simply that I’m too much of an academic conformist, afraid to endorse anything that sounds weird or far-out or culty? I certainly should consider the possibility. If so, though, how do you explain the fact that I’ve publicly said things, right on this blog, several orders of magnitude likelier to get me in trouble than “I’m scared about AI destroying the world”—an idea now so firmly within the Overton Window that Henry Kissinger gravely ponders it in the Wall Street Journal?

More here.  And see Scott Alexander’s reply to Scott Aaronson here.

Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou in the Boston Review:

Speculation encompasses a duality at the core of all financial activity. When pushed to its outermost limit, it can unleash formidable destructive forces and lead to the burst of market bubbles, such as seventeenth-century Amsterdam’s notorious tulip craze, the Victorian era’s railway manias, last century’s Great Depression, or the more recent 2008 global financial crisis. During these periods, market “passions” take hold: traders venerate ethereal values with no material referents or links to “fundamentals.” Yet speculation is also the market’s indispensable lubricant. All speculative trades calibrate risks to generate yields and prevent markets from “overheating.”

More here.

Michael Clune at the Paris Review:

I’ve been clean for over twenty years. Let me give you an example of the kind of problem addiction is, the scale of the thing. In April 2019 I went to the dentist. I had a mild ache in a molar. He said the whole tooth was totally rotted all the way through, that they couldn’t do anything more with it. It was hopeless. The tooth was a total piece of shit and would have to be extracted. He gave me the number of a dental surgeon and I called and made an appointment. I talked to my dad, who’d had many teeth extracted, and he told me it was no big deal. When I got to the dental surgeon’s office I told him that I’m a recovering addict, and that I wanted to avoid opiate painkillers. He looked in my mouth and when he got out he said, “You’re going to need opiate painkillers.”

Then he shot me up with Novocain and he went in there with a wrench, and I realized that dentists have soft, delicate hands and seem like doctors, like intellectuals, but when you really need dental care, you go to a dental surgeon and their main qualification is brute physical strength.

more here.

Oliver Balch at Literary Review:

For all mankind’s meddling, nature is obdurate. It didn’t stop evolving just because humans tried to keep it out. Wilson asks us to imagine our cities from the perspective of certain plants or animals. If you’re a seaside goldenrod or a strip of Danish scurvy grass, then the sodium-enriched verges created by winter salt trucks are a dream habitat. For a peregrine falcon, the difference between a twenty-storey skyscraper and a hundred-foot cliff is minimal: the dive-bombing potential is equally great. Nonetheless, not all natural species can adapt. As Wilson admits, our cities as they currently stand are the ‘site of eco-apocalypse’. Even putting the rights of nature aside, wilding our streets is in our self-interest. Just ask a psychologist or a physician. We’re happier, healthier and safer with nature near at hand.

Written in an authoritative yet accessible style, Urban Jungle contains a range of intriguing insights. Despite its non-hectoring tone, the book offers a clear warning. 

more here.

I Invent You

I invent you in the garden
I invent that you talk to me
that you call me
and in fact you do talk to me
and sometimes I don’t understand
what you say
and I am amazed at you
at your mystery
and I pretend that I understand
so that you won’t go away.
Day after day I invent you
and that’s my way
of confronting your absence
because if I don’t invent you
the joy of my hours
would vanish
and you as well.

by Claribel Alegria
from Sorrow
Curbstone Press, 1999

Regan Penaluna in aeon:

In 1696, Damaris Cudworth Masham, an Englishwoman and a reluctant philosopher, stepped from obscurity to publish a book whose title – A Discourse Concerning the Love of God – concealed the feminist gems within. For instance, she insisted, contrary to some philosophers and theologians of her day, that mothers were not corrupting forces but foundational to the pursuit of knowledge. Then in 1705 she entered the public sphere again with another work, more radical than the first, titled Occasional Thoughts in Reference to a Vertuous or Christian Life, in which she argued that women should contribute to all intellectual subjects: ‘I see no Reason why it should not be thought that all Science lyes as open to a Lady as to a Man.’

Masham was also close to the Enlightenment philosopher John Locke. Their friendship endured for almost 20 years. It was an intellectual, personal and at times romantic exchange that began before her marriage and endured after Locke moved into her home with her husband and children. No need to write letters when you can share ideas near the fire in the evenings. This was a period of great philosophical flourishing for Masham, during which she wrote her two and only books.

More here.

Gina Kolata in The New York Times:

Millions of Americans who are at high risk for heart attacks and whose LDL cholesterol levels are disturbingly high have been told over and over again by their doctors to take a statin. These cheap generic drugs have been shown repeatedly to slash cholesterol levels and prevent heart attacks, strokes and deaths. But many people cannot or will not take the drugs, often reporting that statins make their muscles ache.

Now, a study with 14,000 patients of a drug that lowers LDL levels and was designed to avoid muscle aches was found to modestly reduce the risk of heart attacks, strokes and other complications from heart disease. It was published Saturday in The New England Journal of Medicine and presented at the annual meeting of the American College of Cardiology. The medication joins several statin alternatives that have been shown to reduce cardiac illnesses, and some experts say they doubt the drug is any more likely to be embraced by patients who are wary of statins and, often, other LDL-lowering drugs. The drug, bempedoic acid, is not new; the Food and Drug Administration approved it three years ago because it lowers LDL levels.

More here.

Carolyn Forché in Literary Hub:

In memory we are standing in the kitchen of the Treman Cottage at Breadloaf. It is late afternoon in the summer of 1976 and I have brought my copies of Return to a Place Lit by a Glass of Milk and Dismantling the Silence for Charles Simic to sign. He is slouching a bit, leaning against the counter, and seems genuinely touched that I had carried the books, deeply penciled and dog-eared, all the way from home.

As he leafed through them, I blurted out that my family was from Czechoslovakia, and of course because it was a country that had been cobbled together in 1918, conjoining several parts of former Austro-Hungary, he wanted to know precisely where my ancestors had lived. I told him Slovakia, in Bardejov, in the eastern part of the country, in one of the oldest towns. “So you are Slovak!” he said, “and we are both peasants!” He laughed, then scrawled in his book with a fat pen: “Now that the Serbs and Slovaks have learned to read and write, look out world! Yours, Charlie.”

More here.

Roberto Casati & Patrick Cavanagh in The MIT Press Reader:

Painters have long struggled with the difficulties of depicting shadows, so much so that shadows — after a brief, spectacular showcase in ancient Roman paintings and mosaics — are almost absent from pictorial art up to the Renaissance and then are hardly present outside traditional Western art.

Here, we embark on a journey that takes us through a number of extraordinary pictorial experiments — some successful, some less so, but all interesting. We have singled out some broad categories of solutions to pictorial problems: depicted shadows having trouble negotiating obstacles in their path; shadow shapes and colors that stretch credibility; inconsistent illumination in the scene; and shadow character getting lost. We also find some taboos, that is, self-inflicted limitations on where or what to depict of a shadow.

More here.

Matthew Yglesias in Slow Boring:

Earlier this month the CDC released the results of its Youth Risk Behavior Survey of American teenagers. The findings have been much discussed, with the focus largely and understandably on the fact that teenage girls are suffering from extraordinarily high levels of sadness and depression. But I think the conversation has overlooked a few things.

One possible culprit for this widespread sadness is that social media apps are especially damaging to girls’ psychological health, a thesis long championed by Jonathan Haidt. And even though on its face Haidt’s point seems left-wing (new technology has downside risks and big companies need to be regulated more), the idea has taken on a mostly right-wing inflection, with Josh Hawley as its most vocal champion in the Senate.

More here.

Amitava Kumar in Granta:

In Delhi the heat is chemical, something unworldly, a dry bandage or heating pad wrapped around the body. I sent a note to my friend Ravish, who was an anchor on NDTV’s Hindi show Prime Time. I asked Ravish that if Inuit supposedly have more than fifty words for snow (a specific word, for example, for snow used to make water), why don’t we Indians have more words for heat? Ravish asked members of his audience to respond to this question. Words and phrases that Ravish and I didn’t know, in a mix of Indian languages, came in from different cities and parts of the country, adding nuance and variety to what the newspapers were only calling a ‘heatwave’. Ravish concluded his monologue by saying that if you forget the many words for heat in your own language, you will also forget the names of your neighbors or the fact that people of two different religions used to live peaceably together. You will also forget why you are beginning to forget.

My publisher provided a car for me to go to bookshops and sign copies of my books. At one point I passed a billboard that showed a fighter jet in the sky and above it these words: Join IAF and give your career a flying start. That Indian Air Force ad hadn’t changed for forty years. I remember seeing it from bus windows in my late teens, and how, because I lacked any sense of direction, I would imagine myself in a jet, my head in the clouds.

More here.

Will Douglas Heaven in the MIT Technology Review:

To get the inside story behind the chatbot—how it was made, how OpenAI has been updating it since release, and how its makers feel about its success—I talked to four people who helped build what has become one of the most popular internet apps ever. In addition to Agarwal and Fedus, I spoke to John Schulman, a cofounder of OpenAI, and Jan Leike, the leader of OpenAI’s alignment team, which works on the problem of making AI do what its users want it to do (and nothing more).

What I came away with was the sense that OpenAI is still bemused by the success of its research preview, but has grabbed the opportunity to push this technology forward, watching how millions of people are using it and trying to fix the worst problems as they come up.

More here.

From The New Yorker:

In this week’s New Yorker, the contributing writer Merve Emre examines the life and work of Italo Calvino, whom she describes as “word for word, the most charming writer to put pen to paper in the twentieth century.” Born a hundred years ago in Cuba, Calvino relocated as a child to his parents’ native Italy, and eventually became the most-translated Italian author of his era. In 1983, The New Yorker published “The Jaguar Sun,” Calvino’s first story in the magazine and the only one to appear in its pages while he was alive. In the story, a couple enters an odd and rocky phase of their marriage while vacationing in Mexico—and while bonding over a sampling of dishes that contain the native hot chile pepper. With vivid descriptions of the dishes—and of the physical responses they elicit—the piece also opens “Under the Jaguar Sun,” Calvino’s unfinished collection of stories about the senses.

On the outskirts of Mexico City, the unnamed narrator and his wife, Olivia, visit a former convent’s cloister and eat chiles en nogada, “somewhat wrinkled little peppers, swimming in a walnut sauce whose harshness and bitter aftertaste were drowned in a creamy, sweetish surrender.” In Oaxaca, a folkloric painting of a nun, who died of love, seems to make the couple hungry; at the hotel restaurant, they snack on guacamole, “scooped up with crisp tortillas that snap into many shards and dip like spoons into the thick cream.” After the pair visit the sacred and spooky ruins of Monte Albán, the menu turns fleshy and visceral: over roast goat and shrimp soup, the narrator imagines being chewed up, swallowed, and digested by his wife, who is openly bored and annoyed by him. (He should, he thinks, eat her instead.) Can two individuals—by sharing a flavorful meal, or through another activity—ever completely unite? As the trip continues, the narrator searches for the answer not in his wife’s eyes but in her teeth.

More here.