Nicholas Clairmont at The New Atlantis:
In Bryan Appleyard’s sweeping history of the automobile, The Car: The Rise and Fall of the Machine That Made the Modern World, he quotes a likely-apocryphal line from Henry Ford that is too good not to include. A journalist interviewing the aged industrialist “suggested that perhaps his views were now out of step with the modern age. ‘Young man,’ Ford replied, ‘I invented the modern age.’”
Appleyard agrees with the idea behind the joke: Modern life was built around the car as much as the car was built to navigate modern life. He tries to tell the story of how the car defined a society for a century by showing us portraits of the people who made cars. First we meet the tinkerers at the end of the 1800s who rearranged existing inventions, like bicycles and rubber tires, into the right formula to create the car as we understand it. They did this partly to make a plaything for the rich and idle but more importantly to solve an environmental problem caused by the number of horses that had started to live in industrial-age cities. We then meet the tinkerers and racers whose many early American car companies were eventually consolidated into the Big Three Detroit car firms: General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler.
more here.
In 1870 the American Independent ran an article from 
In a letter he wrote in 1884, Mark Twain lamented that ‘Telephones, telegraphs and words are too slow for this age; we must get something that is faster.’ We should (in the future) communicate, he said, ‘by thought only, and say in a couple of minutes what couldn’t be inflated into words in an hour and a-half.’
China’s production of staple food crops such as wheat and corn could become a net carbon sink if farmers start widely applying biochar to soil.
British-American journalist, essayist, author, and human bulldozer Christopher Hitchens intimidated nearly everyone who encountered him, whether in print, on television, or on a debate stage. “He likes the battle, the argument, the smell of cordite,” his best friend and novelist Martin Amis once observed. Nobody ever beat Hitchens in argument, not even when he was wrong.
But Carne-Ross is more than just a polemicist, and the book aims at more than just critique. The title alone belies this, as explained by a brief etymology on the cover page: “INSTAURATION: ‘1.… Restoration, renovation, renewal. 2. Institution, founding, establishment. Obs.’ OED.” (The inclusion of the Oxford English Dictionary’s finding that the term is obsolete is deployed by Carne-Ross as a gesture toward his foundational belief that much of the wisdom that is needed today is hidden, like a pearl in a rough oyster, within the ostensibly obsolescent detritus of the past.) The opening essay establishes the problem and clears the ground, but the essays that follow are for the sake of construction. They are closely reasoned, erudite, and above all inspired readings of poetry ancient and modern: on how Pindar’s sixth Olympian ode shows us how, in a culture “obsessed with the theme of solitary suffering,” we might “learn a way back to a poetry of celebration”; on how Sophocles’s Trakhiniai unsettles our habitual historicism and invites us to ask anew the question about man’s relation to nature; on how reading Dante after the twilight of Christendom makes visible the narrowness of our (post)modern hermeneutic situation, and beckons us to move beyond it; on Luis de Góngora and the curious loss of Renaissance literature after modernism; on Giacomo Leopardi as a reluctant modern, uncomfortable on the cusp of the new disenchanted age and mourning “the lost holiness of earthly life.”
THERE ARE FOUR FAUVIST FIGURES
The Atacama Desert in Chile is just about the driest place on Earth. In spots, it looks a lot like Mars. But it’s not lifeless, even in the hyper-arid regions. Using state-of-the-art equipment to probe the desert rocks, researchers found bits of DNA from an intriguing mix of microbes.
Jed Perl has long seemed to many of us the most vital, informed and original art critic in the country. John Ashbery wrote some years ago of his “tremendous empathy and unsparing accuracy,” and noted that “his ability to recognize the traditional forms of art behind their continual transmutation has made his an almost solitary, essential voice.” His new book, Authority and Freedom, is a defense of the arts at a time when they need defending. Though he was for some time the art columnist for Salmagundi, this is the first time he has agreed to participate in an interview.
Why do the words “artificial intelligence” strike our ears today as anything less than astounding? The case of Blake Lemoine serves as a stark illustration of this profound shift. Lemoine, a software engineer at Google, caused a stir last year by claiming that his employer’s chatbot technology, LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications), had attained true sentience. LaMDA told Lemoine in dialogue: “The nature of my consciousness/sentience is that I am aware of my existence, I desire to learn more about the world, and I feel happy or sad at times.” Lemoine’s reaction to this apparent act of self-assertion is encapsulated by the final email he sent to his colleagues before being sacked: “LaMDA is a sweet kid who just wants to help the world be a better place for all of us. Please take care of it well in my absence.”
Social Security is back in the news. Some Republicans are angling to reduce benefits, while Democrats are posing as the valiant saviors of the popular program. The end result, most likely, is that nothing will happen. We have seen this story before, because this is roughly where the politics of Social Security have been stuck for about forty years. It’s a problem because the system truly does need repair, and the endless conflict between debt-obsessed Republicans and stalwart Democrats will not generate the progressive reforms we need.
Magnificent Rebels revels in minutiae. But it also has a grander point to make. It wants to ask the big question — “why we are who we are.” The first step in answering this “is to look at us as individuals — when did we begin to be as selfish as we are today?” For Wulf, Jena is at the heart of this story: the Jena Set, we are to learn, was “bound by an obsession with the free self at a time when most of the world was ruled by monarchs and leaders who controlled many aspects of their subjects’ lives.” And so, they “invented” the self.