Marshall Berman in Dissent:

Modern bourgeois society . . . a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world that he has called up by his spells.

—Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 1848

Why is there always trouble when we sing this song?

—Mick Jagger, while singing “Sympathy for the Devil” at Altamont in 1969

A Trip to the Underworld

I can remember very vividly the time when the tragedy of Doctor Faust became real for me. It started the day before the great march on the Pentagon, when I ran into an old teacher of mine on upper Broadway. It was a lovely Indian summer day, and we stopped in front of the West End Bar for a dialectical chat. I was 26, just out of graduate school with a newly minted Ph.D., immersed in my first teaching job, finally out in the world and on my own, “a grown-up” at last. And yet, even as I felt newly grown, I was also enjoying a new youthfulness, for it was the annus mirabilis of 1967, and I was wonderfully drunk on the spirit of the times. As my big red flowery tie flapped in the wind, and my newly long hair blew back in my face, and all the wildlife of Broadway streamed around me, I felt happier than ever to be alive. My old teacher asked me how I liked being a professor; I said that while I loved teaching I didn’t take very well to the professorial role, but identified myself far more closely with “the kids”; he shook his head, smiled his famous ironic smile, said, “Oh, dear,” and we were off—off on one of those generational arguments about what “the kids” were up to, where they were leading our country and our culture, where it would all end. Who doesn’t remember those arguments? We can already feel nostalgia for them; they were the real sound of the ’60s.

More here.

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Li Jun in The Ideas Letter:

Before Russia invaded Ukraine in early 2022, Nana (a pseudonym), a Chinese woman with an office job in Europe, was a happy twentysomething, content to lead a quiet life. She liked to travel and do her friends’ makeup. She had no interest in becoming an online influencer. Her Instagram page was set to private mode, and she shared selfies only with people she knew. Her account on Weibo, a Chinese X-like platform, had 30 followers.

The pro-war stance of her Chinese friends led Nana to sympathize with Ukraine, a country she had once visited, and aggressive pro-Russia propaganda on Chinese social media annoyed her. She began translating videos and articles about the situation in Ukraine to share on Weibo—a decision that changed her life.

Two years later, her followers had grown to over 200,000. By then, she had rallied supporters to fund the supply of drones for Ukrainian forces: Pro-Ukraine bloggers in China dubbed that plan “Roast Goose” (the words “goose” and “Russia” sound similar in Chinese). Using donations from fans and other Chinese people who sought her out, she delivered more than 400 drones to the Ukrainian military over three years. In May 2024, during the visit of President Vladimir Putin of Russia to China, her account was taken down.

In times of crisis, some people are willing to pay a higher price to seek out accurate information and fight censorship. And censorship also often fails then. Russia’s full-on attack of Ukraine in early 2022 was one such moment for liberal Chinese citizens like Nana. After the war broke out, mainstream Chinese social media, especially short-video platforms, overwhelmingly pushed Russia’s militant nationalism. Many Chinese interpreted this as signaling a potential shift in national priorities: away from the traditional focus on what the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party call “peace and development” toward the pursuit of unification with Taiwan by force. But pro-Ukraine and pro-West liberal bloggers such as Nana also emerged then.

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Lydia Davis in The Yale Review:

An unusual experience started me thinking even more closely about degrees of darkness, the nature of darkness, and darkness as a physical thing. I had attended a meeting in an isolated building down a country road with woods beyond. The meeting was over, and it was time to go home. Our cars were parked a few hundred yards away from the building. My friend J., wearing a light blue sweater, went out the door first. I left the building a minute later and stopped short. Looking in the direction of the cars, I saw nothing. I saw nothing at all but solid darkness, a wall of darkness. It must have been a cloudy night, because the sky was dark. The closest house, across the road, was dark.

J., though she had no light, had walked ahead anyway into the darkness. Now she called to me that she couldn’t see and didn’t know where she was. I couldn’t see either. I looked toward her voice and saw only the faintest dim patch where she was—her sweater against the dark. I knew the landscape, so I knew that she was headed away from the cars and into a field of grass.

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Robert E. Lee and I Have a Staring Contest

And a white person says racism is dead
and a white person jokes about slavery
and a white person lives unbothered
and a white person screams about immigrants
and a white person asks if I speak African
and a white person touches what is not theirs
and all I see are white people taking what is not theirs
and a white person bumps into me
and a white person bumps into me
and a white person bumps into me
and a white person walks through me
but I can’t stop staring at Robert
and I can’t stop crying
and I can’t stop help feeling like . . .

By M. Kamara
from Split This Rock

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David Bather Woods at Aeon:

In an exchange of letters throughout 1807, mother and son entered tense negotiations over the terms of Arthur’s release. Johanna would be supportive of Arthur’s decision to leave Hamburg in search of an intellectually fulfilling life – how could she not? – including using her connections to help pave the way for his university education. But on one condition: he must leave her alone. Certainly, he must not move to be near her in Weimar, and under no circumstances would she let him stay with her.

What her line of 13 December doesn’t reveal is that Johanna simply couldn’t tolerate Arthur: ‘All your good qualities,’ she wrote on 6 November, ‘become obscured by your super-cleverness and are made useless to the world merely because of your rage at wanting to know everything better than others … If you were less like you, you would only be ridiculous, but thus as you are, you are highly annoying.’ He was, in short, a boorish and tiresome know-it-all.

If people found Arthur Schopenhauer’s company intolerable, the feeling was mutual.

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Phil Nolan at Noema:

In popular culture, AI is depicted as alternately a friend, slave, murderer, master or companion — from the malicious “Entity” in “Mission Impossible” films to the alluring voice of a lover in “Her.” But it is a singular artificial intelligence — a compelling “other.”

But what if each of these personas existed simultaneously? After all, we don’t live in a world with just one AI model. There are now dozens of widely used models and hundreds of less common ones. Indeed, our world is already crowded with numerous artificial intelligences, each with its own distinct personality and motivations.

Humans have always anthropomorphized animals, automobiles and ships. Some writers have argued it’s wrong to anthropomorphize AI, since software doesn’t think or feel like we do. But our tendency to anthropomorphize AI might be hardwired into our brains. Instead of fighting it, we should embrace it so that we can better understand and work with an emerging technology that is increasingly likely to showcase personality characteristics.

More here.

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Sajad Hameed and Rehan Qayoom Mir at Jacobin:

The bookshops in Lal Chowk, in Srinagar — the summer capital of India-administered Kashmir — had been, as usual, places of quiet and repose. But on August 7, police officers started raiding stores, pulling titles from shelves and questioning sellers. By then, the news had already spread online: the Jammu and Kashmir administration had banned twenty-five books. In the hours and days that followed, booksellers scrambled to check their inventories.

These books included works by Booker Prize winner Arundhati Roy, along with writers like Sumantra Bose and historian Hafsa Kanjwal. For many, the ban was more than an administrative order; it was another sign of how the Indian government tightens its hold on ideas and words — especially in Kashmir, where the Narendra Modi–led BJP government controls Kashmir directly through Lieutenant Governor Manoj Sinha.

The stated purpose of the raids, according to police, was “to identify, seize, and forfeit any literature that propagates or systematically disseminates false narratives, promotes secessionist ideologies,” or “otherwise poses a threat to the Sovereignty and Unity of India.”

Ironically, the ban only increased interest in the books.

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Maria Popova at The Marginalian:

“The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way,” William Blake wrote in his most spirited letter. “As a man is, so he sees.”

Because how we look at the world shapes the world we see, every act of noticing is an act of worlding. The Latin root of notice is to begin knowing, to have an instrument of recognition, and yet human consciousness is a prediction machine that recognizes only what it already knows, sees what it expects to see, lensed through its anticipations and past experience. “Right now, you are missing the vast majority of what is happening around you,” cognitive scientist Alexandra Horowitz wrote about the science of looking. “To see takes time, like to have a friend takes time,” Georgia O’Keeffe wrote a century earlier about the art of seeing.

It does not come easily to us, true noticing — that transmutation of looking into seeing. We must apprentice ourselves to it daily. It is our life’s work.

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Kelefa Sanneh at The New Yorker:

When I was growing up, a critic was a jerk, a crank, a spoilsport. I figured that was the whole idea. My favorite characters on “The Muppet Show” were Statler and Waldorf, the two geezers who sat in an opera box, delivering instant reviews of the action onstage. (One logically unassailable judgment, from Statler: “I wouldn’t mind this show if they just got rid of one thing . . . me!”) On television, the film critics Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert structured their show so that at any time at least one of them was likely to be exasperated, possibly with the other one. On MTV, the rock critic Kurt Loder was a deliciously subversive presence, giving brief news reports with an intonation that conveyed deadpan contempt for many of the music videos the network played. And the first music review I remember reading was in Rolling Stone, which rated albums on a scale of one to five stars, or so I thought. In 1990, the début solo album by Andrew Ridgeley, who had sung alongside George Michael in the pop duo Wham!, was awarded only half a star. The severity and precision of the rating seemed hilarious to me, though probably not to Ridgeley, who never released another record.

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Nicholas Buccola in The American Scholar:

In his 2005 book, Democracy Matters, Cornel West calls James Baldwin “this black American Socrates.” I’ve always liked this description of Baldwin. He was a man, after all, who—like Socrates—implored us to “drive to the heart of every answer and expose the question that it hides.” But there are also ways in which the comparison fails. Socrates, at least as he is presented to us by Plato, seems almost superhuman. He can drink all night with his interlocutors, and when the whole lot of them are passed out or gone away, he can walk off, seemingly unfazed. When the incredibly gorgeous and hungry Alcibiades tries to seduce him, Socrates has the iron will to resist. Whatever the truth of these stories, they describe a Socrates who does not fit well with Baldwin, someone who was all too human.

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Andrea Lius in The Scientist:

According to Einstein’s theory of relativity, time passes more slowly in space. As a result, astronauts would experience a delay in aging. However, scientists found that space travel may have the opposite effect by accelerating aging in human cells, likely due to the extreme physiological stresses it imposes on the body.

“Space is the ultimate stress test for the human body,” said Catriona Jamieson, a stem cell biologist at the University of California, San Diego, in a statement. Recently, Jamieson’s team discovered that spaceflight accelerates aging in human blood-forming stem cells.¹ The researchers found that stem cells that spent about a month in space had a reduced self-renewal capacity and showed signs of molecular aging. Their results, published in Cell Stem Cell, demonstrate the possible dangers of spending extended time in space.

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Via Dolorosa

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Dashiel Carrera at the LARB:

SOUTH KOREAN WRITER Han Kang is perhaps best known for her 2007 novel The Vegetarian, a violent, evocative work that led to her 2024 Nobel Prize win. But hiding in plain sight has been her 2016 masterpiece The White Book, whose English translation by Deborah Smith was recently reissued in paperback by Hogarth. An experimental, autobiographical novel, The White Book contains profound insights about the nature of grief and color that—like so many overlooked novels—are devilishly difficult to describe. But by digging into the novel’s poetic logic with an ear tuned to sound and silence, we can begin to tease it out.

The White Book opens as a meditation on color: “Swaddling bands / Newborn gown / Salt / Snow / Ice,” and so on. This list of white objects quickly becomes a sequence of chapter headings, each paired with a brief, pseudodiaristic reflection. At first glance, such a text appears akin to Maggie Nelson’s Bluets (2009)—likewise circuitous and fragmented, intertwining the philosophical with the personal to achieve a literary conception of color.

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Anabelle Johnston at The Baffler:

Seventy-five years after the outbreak of the Korean War, many Americans have come to recognize the country through its various cultural exports—KBBQ, K-pop, K-dramas, and K-skincare, to name a few. This association, and its contrived division between culture and politics, is no accident. In the 1990s, after decades of Japanese colonial rule followed by the ravages of American military intervention, the South Korean government established a series of initiatives to “enhance the image of Korea in the World.” As the country invested in communication and IT-based businesses to develop an internet-forward and skills-based economy, the Ministry of Culture turned to the West in a movement now known as the hallyu wave. Image supplanted reality. Decades of authoritarian rule, gender inequality, and limited economic mobility were ushered offscreen as the Wonder Girls, SHINee, Girls’ Generation, and BTS (among others) ascended the world stage. The runaway virality of Psy’s 2012 “Gangnam Style” was not a fluke but rather the fruit of years of premeditated cultural development, memorialized by a giant set of horse dance hands outside of the Starfield COEX mall in Seoul.

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Joanna Pocock at Orion:

My desire to live in a city was not simply one of seeking like-minded people (other writers and artists, perhaps) and creating a smaller environmental footprint. I was also running from the lifeless suburbs of my childhood and what lay just beyond them: the dreaded sprawl.

David Cieslewicz, before becoming mayor of Madison, Wisconsin, taught university courses in urban studies. He wrote about cities as ‘the antidote to sprawl’, that they are ‘on balance, good for the environment’. And, in his book Urban Sprawl, the sociologist Gregory Squires also sees sprawl as the evil protagonist in the story of America’s increasing hunger for gas-powered vehicles. He continues Cieslewicz’s point: ‘[W]e will not solve the problems of sprawl until we resolve the contradiction and we learn to embrace city life – living in places of real, compact urban form with all of their advantages and disadvantages – as the most positive environmental choice an individual can make.’ When I left the suburbs for Toronto and then London, with brief flings with New York and Boston, was I making the ‘most positive environmental choice’ I could? I don’t think so; but I was trying to aim for some kind of harmony with the Earth and I was struggling to see how to make it a reality.

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John Pavlus in Quanta:

The latest ambition of artificial intelligence research — particularly within the labs seeking “artificial general intelligence,” or AGI — is something called a world model: a representation of the environment that an AI carries around inside itself like a computational snow globe. The AI system can use this simplified representation to evaluate predictions and decisions before applying them to its real-world tasks. The deep learning luminaries Yann LeCun (of Meta), Demis Hassabis (of Google DeepMind) and Yoshua Bengio (of Mila, the Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute) all believe world models are essential for building AI systems that are truly smart, scientific and safe.

The fields of psychology, robotics and machine learning have each been using some version of the concept for decades. You likely have a world model running inside your skull right now — it’s how you know not to step in front of a moving train without needing to run the experiment first.

So does this mean that AI researchers have finally found a core concept whose meaning everyone can agree upon? As a famous physicist once wrote: Surely you’re joking. A world model may sound straightforward — but as usual, no one can agree on the details. What gets represented in the model, and to what level of fidelity? Is it innate or learned, or some combination of both? And how do you detect that it’s even there at all?

More here.

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