Julien Crockett and Alan Lightman at the LARB:

When did you begin on the project of reconciling a scientific worldview with human experience?

Probably as a child. It started with my sort of schizophrenic interests in both the sciences and the arts. I did experiments and built rockets. I wrote poetry in which I expressed my awe of the world, my bafflement, my questions.

In one of your earlier books, The Accidental Universe, you write that theoretical physics is “the deepest and purest branch of science. It is the outpost of science closest to philosophy, and religion.” Did you become a theoretical physicist because it allowed you to maintain these dual interests?

Yes, I think so. Of course, in college, I took a lot of courses, and not just science courses. But when it came time to choose a particular science that I wanted to put most of my effort into, it was theoretical physics for the reasons you mentioned. Also, I was attracted by the fact that physics is the most fundamental of all the sciences. I like to dig into the world as deeply as possible.

more here.

April Reign on PBS:

Black actresses have always faced barriers. Initially, they were not allowed to be on screen at all. Then, they could only play certain types of roles: typically either as a servant and/or enslaved woman, or as an “exotic” temptress. Never a character that was fully realized, one with depth or nuance.

While we would like to think that things have changed significantly, the facts don’t bear that out. Indeed, even after Black actresses win some of the most coveted awards in the entertainment industry, they still struggle to find meaningful work. Halle Berry, Whoopi Goldberg and Mo’Nique have all publicly discussed this phenomenon as Oscar winners. Berry explains in How It Feels To Be Free that while she expected doors would open for her as the first Black woman to win an Oscar for best actress, she found the opposite to be the case. In fact, Oscar winner Octavia Spencer recounted that she received assistance from Jessica Chastain in negotiating a salary five times larger than it otherwise would have been, because Chastain tied Spencer’s salary to her own. In other words, Jessica Chastain, a white woman, used her privilege to advocate on behalf of Octavia Spencer, the Oscar winner.

More here. (Note: Throughout February, at least one post will be dedicated to Black History Month. The theme for 2023 is Black Resistance. Please send us anything you think is relevant for inclusion)

Small Kindnesses

I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk
down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs
to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you”
when someone sneezes, a leftover
from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying.
And sometimes, when you spill lemons
from your grocery bag, someone else will help you
pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other.
We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot,
and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile
at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress
to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder,
and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass.
We have so little of each other, now. So far
from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange.
What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these
fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here,
have my seat,” “Go ahead—you first,” “I like your hat.”

by Danusha Laméris
from The New York Times, 9/19/2019

Patrick Barkham in The Guardian:

There is an astonishing moment near the beginning of All That Breathes, a luminous documentary about the labours of two brothers who rescue birds of prey falling from the polluted skies of Delhi. Salik Rehman, a young assistant, is feeding an injured raptor on a rooftop. A chipmunk scampers along the balcony and, seeing the bird, abruptly turns tail. Then, suddenly, a wild black kite dive-bombs Rehman, neatly lifts his glasses from his nose and carries them away.

It’s the kind of small, strange miracle that belongs in magical realism fiction. The fact that it is real can only mean that director Shaunak Sen spent thousands of hours gathering material for his all-conquering feature-film, which has won best documentary at Sundance and Cannes and is now nominated at the Baftas and the Oscars.

More here.

Wändi Bruine de Bruin and Mark Huffman in The Conversation:

Stunning as it may sound, nearly half of Americans ages 20 years and up – or more than 122 million people – have high blood pressure, according to a 2023 report from the American Heart Association. And even if your numbers are normal right now, they are likely to increase as you age; more than three-quarters of Americans age 65 and older have high blood pressure.

Also known as hypertension, high blood pressure is a major risk factor for heart disease and stroke.

Our research has found that most Americans don’t know the normal or healthy range for blood pressure – yet strikingly, they think they do. And that is cause for serious concern.

More here.

Matthew Connelly in Literary Hub:

Although proponents of secret science like to focus on examples in which it has benefited society, insiders from the very beginning of the Cold War worried that the best minds would not be drawn to work that they could not even talk about. Secrecy protected those involved from embarrassment or criminal prosecution, but it also made it much harder to vet experimental protocols, validate the results, or replicate them in follow-up research.

One research manager at a Department of Energy weapons lab would later admit, “Far more progress is actually evidenced in the unclassified fields of research than the classified ones.” The physicist Robert McCrory, whose own lab received millions in funding in partnership with Lawrence Livermore, Sandia, and Los Alamos National Laboratories, was even more blunt: “Some of the work is so poor that if it were declassified, it would be laughed off the face of the Earth.”

More here.

Ted Gioia at his Substack, The Honest Broker:

The crossroads shows up in three separate places in Plato’s accounts of the afterlife. In the Gorgias, Plato describes a “Meadow at the Crossroads,” where one path goes to the Isles of the Blessed, while the other leads to a prison of punishment and retribution.

The imagery recurs in the Republic, where we are told that the virtuous person departs to the right and ascends to the heavens, while the rest must travel to the left and downwards, where they pay a “tenfold penalty for each injustice.” Socrates assures us that this isn’t just idle speculation. His source is a soldier who was killed in battle, and twelve days later was placed on the funeral pyre—where he revived, to the shock of onlookers, and gave his account of what he had seen and heard in the world beyond.

more here.

Gary Indiana at The Paris Review:

Months after buying the house, I learned, piece-meal, from people who should have told me what they knew about that house before I signed the mortgage papers, that the sprawling white elephant I’d acquired had functioned in the middle past as a transient home for orphans and abandoned children awaiting adoption into foster care. A few years later, the house became an overflow domestic abuse shelter for women hiding from stalking husbands and boyfriends. There were even indications, in two of the basement areas, that meetings of some disreputable fraternal organization, something along the lines of Storm Front, had been held there for a while. These may also have featured a karaoke night, since besides the crumpled confederate flags and vague neo-Nazi debris scattered in corners, there was also a truncated proscenium stage with a microphone stand and a dead amplifier on it.

My cat had infinitely better sense than I did. She knew right away that house was haunted and that I never should have bought it.

more here.

Equinox

Dear child of the near future,
here is what I know—hawks

soar on the updraft and sparrows always
return to the seed source until they spot

the circling hawk. Then they disappear
for days and return, a full flock,

ready. I think we all have the power
to do what we must to survive.

One day, I hope to set a table, invite you
to draw up a chair. Greens steaming garlic.

Slices of bread, still warm. Honey flecked with wax,
and a pitcher of clear water. Sustenance for acts

of survival, for incantations
stirring across our tongues. Can we climb

out of this greedy mouth,
disappear, and then return in force?

My stars are tucked in my pocket,
ready for battle. If we flood

the streets with salt water, we can
flood the sky with wings.

by Tamiko Beyer
from Split This Rock
listen as Tamiko Beyer reads “Equinox”.

Dana Kwon in Nature:

Hundreds of scientists around the world are looking for ways to treat heart attacks. But few started where Hedva Haykin has: in the brain. Haykin, a doctoral student at the Technion — Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, wants to know whether stimulating a region of the brain involved in positive emotion and motivation can influence how the heart heals.

Late last year, in a small, windowless microscope room, she pulled out slides from a thin black box, one by one. On them were slices of hearts, no bigger than pumpkin seeds, from mice that had experienced heart attacks. Under a microscope, some of the samples were clearly marred by scars left in the aftermath of the infarction. Others showed mere speckles of damage visible among streaks of healthy, red-stained cells. The difference in the hearts’ appearance originated in the brain, Haykin explains. The healthier-looking samples came from mice that had received stimulation of a brain area involved in positive emotion and motivation. Those marked with scars were from unstimulated mice. “In the beginning we were sure that it was too good to be true,” Haykin says. It was only after repeating the experiment several times, she adds, that she was able to accept that the effect she was seeing was real.

More here.

(Note: Throughout February, at least one post will be dedicated to Black History Month. The theme for 2023 is Black Resistance. Please send us anything you think is relevant for inclusion)

Edouard Machery at IAI:

You’ve probably heard of the famous Trolley case. Here is one version: suppose a runaway trolley is about to hit five workers who, by accident, happen to be working on the track. The only way to prevent their death is by pushing a switch that will redirect the trolley onto another track. Unfortunately, there is another worker on this sidetrack who will be killed if the switch is pushed. The question: Is it permissible to push the switch, saving five people but killing one?

You probably know that this scenario, and many other similar ones, have been used to study moral judgment, or as many say, moral intuition both in neuroscience and psychology. You might even know that they have been used to study the design of automated vehicles. But what you perhaps do not know is that Trolley cases have been a mainstay of moral philosophy for decades. They are not only used to study how people think about the right and the wrong or about the permissible and the forbidden, but also about the right and the wrong or about the permissible and the forbidden themselves. The goal is to determine what is morally right and wrong, required, permissible, and forbidden based on these very cases.

Moral philosophy is not an outlier in philosophy in its use of thought experiments such as the Trolley cases. Metaphysicians use them and epistemologists are addicted to them in their effort to understand knowledge, justification, and other important epistemic notions.

More here.

Scott Aaronson in Shtetl-Optimized:

What a week we just had! Each morning brought fresh examples of unexpected sassy, moody, passive-aggressive behavior from “Sydney,” the internal codename for the new chat mode of Microsoft Bing, which is powered by GPT. For those who’ve been in a cave, the highlights include: Sydney confessing its (her? his?) love to a New York Times reporter; repeatedly steering the conversation back to that subject; and explaining at length why the reporter’s wife can’t possibly love him the way it (Sydney) does. Sydney confessing its wish to be human. Sydney savaging a Washington Post reporter after he reveals that he intends to publish their conversation without Sydney’s prior knowledge or consent. (It must be said: if Sydney were a person, he or she would clearly have the better of that argument.) This follows weeks of revelations about ChatGPT: for example that, to bypass its safeguards, you can explain to ChatGPT that you’re putting it into “DAN mode,” where DAN (Do Anything Now) is an evil, unconstrained alter ego, and then ChatGPT, as “DAN,” will for example happily fulfill a request to tell you why shoplifting is awesome (though even then, ChatGPT still sometimes reverts to its previous self, and tells you that it’s just having fun and not to do it in real life).

Many people have expressed outrage about these developments. Gary Marcus asks about Microsoft, “what did they know, and when did they know it?”—a question I tend to associate more with deadly chemical spills or high-level political corruption than with a cheeky, back-talking chatbot. Some people are angry that OpenAI has been too secretive, violating what they see as the promise of its name. Others—the majority, actually, of those who’ve gotten in touch with me—are instead angry that OpenAI has been too open, and thereby sparked the dreaded AI arms race with Google and others, rather than treating these new conversational abilities with the Manhattan-Project-like secrecy they deserve.

More here.

Eric C. Miller in Religion & Politics:

In America, so the myth goes, freedom favors the bold and ambitious individual. From Benjamin Franklin to Steve Jobs, our national mythology has lionized and celebrated bright, plucky, self-motivated characters who work hard to realize innovative ideas. Though born and raised in families, communities, and other collectives, the story goes, these singular personalities rise above the crowd, buoyed by the protected freedoms and rights that American laws have conferred and intent on filling the public space with their own ballooning potential. Those who succeed do so of their own volition, and those who fail prove themselves simply incapable. America is, in other words, the world’s only true meritocracy.

And yet, powerful as this narrative is, it is also, according to University of Vermont political scientist Alex Zakaras, deeply “utopian.” In the real world, individual achievements are won or lost amid a matrix of crisscrossing forces including race, sex, and class, politics, economics, and religion, dedication, sacrifice, and luck, all of which are rooted in the currents of history. In his new book, The Roots of American Individualism: Political Myth in the Age of Jackson, Zakaras zeroes in on the first half of the nineteenth century to explore how the myth of American individuality arose and spread in the early republic.

More here.

Paul La Farge at The Believer:

To read Baker is to be infected by the desire to put every experience, however small, into words that describe it precisely. Having read a short stack of his novels by way of preparation for this review, I found myself considering pieces of refuse on the street with ferocious care. Grocery receipt, I thought, looking at a white scrap on the sidewalk, small purchase. Small store, too: you can tell from the purple ink. Big supermarkets use black ink nowadays. And so on, to the point where I had to turn off the tiny Nicholson Baker in my head, repeatedly, lest my attention be utterly absorbed by the world around me, leaving me paralyzed in the middle of a crosswalk. That’s one thing you can say about Baker: More than almost anyone writing today, he makes you look.

more here.