Getting my oil changed

and Jeremiah speaks kind    he knows motors    his assessments include what’s
dirty    I am not my car I forget to say    the oil has come    and engines can stutter
and I, too, have been guided over holes I want to tell him    I have found a thing beneath    Jeremiah speaks quick    shows me a stick with what’s left on it    this has shaken me more than not
what is more than not I want to ask my mechanic    his hands are holding what has filtered how driven I can be  but I am not my car I say again    I have receipts to prove that every radiator has its limit    I have a boiling point that keeps me up at night    here is your bill my prophet says    but I am not my car    and this time I am speaking to you    I am driving away from what I love    like a window broken with grief

by Joseph Byrd
from Pedestal Magazine

Maureen Dowd in The New York Times:

Studying “Hamlet,” the revenge play about a rotten kingdom, I tried for years to fathom Hamlet’s motives, state of mind, family web, obsessions.

His consciousness was so complex, Harold Bloom wrote, it seemed bigger than the play itself. Now I’m mired in another revenge play about a rotten kingdom, “Trump.” I’ve tried for years to fathom Donald Trump’s motives, state of mind, family web, obsessions. The man who dumbed down the office of the presidency is a less gratifying subject than the smarty-pants doomed prince. Hamlet is transcendent, while Trump is merely transgressive. But we can’t shuffle off the mortal coil of Trump. He has burrowed, tick-like, into the national bloodstream, causing all kinds of septic responses. Trump is feral, focused on his own survival, with no sense of shame or boundaries or restraint.

“In that sense,” David Axelrod told me, “being a sociopath really works for him.”

More here.

Anne Patchett in Harper’s Magazine:

I can tell you where it all started because I remember the moment exactly. It was late and I’d just finished the novel I’d been reading. A few more pages would send me off to sleep, so I went in search of a short story. They aren’t hard to come by around here; my office is made up of piles of books, mostly advance-reader copies that have been sent to me in hopes I’ll write a quote for the jacket. They arrive daily in padded mailers—novels, memoirs, essays, histories—things I never requested and in most cases will never get to. On this summer night in 2017, I picked up a collection called Uncommon Type, by Tom Hanks. It had been languishing in a pile by the dresser for a while, and I’d left it there because of an unarticulated belief that actors should stick to acting. Now for no particular reason I changed my mind. Why shouldn’t Tom Hanks write short stories? Why shouldn’t I read one? Off we went to bed, the book and I, and in doing so put the chain of events into motion. The story has started without my realizing it. The first door opened and I walked through.

But any story that starts will also end. This is the way novelists think: beginning, middle, and end.

In case you haven’t read it, Uncommon Type is a very good book. It would have to be for this story to continue.

More here.

Ben Gummer at Literary Review:

I was left wondering after a moment of peak Simon Schama – where we are led from his ‘idle’ purchase in Paris of a slim old book on Marcel Proust’s father, Adrien, to his own bookshelves by the Hudson River – whether great historians must have something close to a Proustian affinity for a particular period of history, one they understand not simply as a result of study but which they inhabit emotionally, with a quality not far separated from a kind of memory. The reason why the dim fog of mid-medieval western Europe was cleared by Richard Southern is because he understood that world at an elemental level and could translate that understanding to the reader. The same is true when it comes to Steven Runciman writing on Crusade-torn Byzantium, Eamon Duffy on England on the eve of the Reformation and David Brading on early colonial Latin America.

For Schama, it is the Enlightenment beau monde.

more here.

David Stromberg in The American Scholar:

I got the call late on a summer afternoon. Yanai Segal, an artist I’ve known for years, asked me whether I’d heard of the Salvator Mundi—the painting attributed to Leonardo da Vinci that was lost for more than two centuries before resurfacing in New Orleans in 2005. I told him that I’d heard something of the story but that I didn’t remember the details. He had recently undertaken a project related to the painting, he said, and wanted to tell me about it. I was eager to hear more, but first I needed to remind myself of the basic facts. We agreed to speak again soon.

As I refreshed my memory in the following days, I learned that although there was considerable controversy about the history and legitimacy of the painting, there was some general consensus, too. The Salvator Mundi—“Savior of the World”—was most likely completed at the turn of the 16th century. An oil painting rendered on a walnut panel, it depicts Jesus offering a blessing with his right hand while holding an orb that represents Earth with his left.

More here.

David S. Jones in the Boston Review:

The trouble is not ignorance: we know that heat can kill. Humans have recognized the threat for millennia, and over the last two centuries they have scrutinized heat wave mortality to understand who is most at risk and to develop strategies to prevent those deaths. Still people die. Similarly, we have developed strategies that could moderate climate disaster due to global warming, but our fossil fuel emissions continue to rise. The trouble is that too many continue to do nothing in the face of this knowledge. Understanding the history of thinking about heat and heat waves, and recognizing some of the obstacles to action, can help us to identify opportunities and leverage for action in achieving a cooler future.

More here.

George Soros and others at Project Syndicate:

Rapid progress in the development of artificial intelligence has been too rapid for many, including pioneers of the technology, who are now issuing dire warnings about the future of our economies, democracies, and humanity itself. But AI is hardly the first technological advance that has been portrayed as an existential threat.

George Soros, Chairman of Soros Fund Management and the Open Society Foundations, thinks that AI is different. Not only is it “impossible for ordinary human intelligence” fully to comprehend AI; the technology will be virtually impossible to regulate. Powerful incentives to cheat mean that regulations would have to be “globally enforceable” – an “unattainable” goal at a time of conflict between “open” and “closed” societies.

More here.

Aubade: The Morning Beast

Maybe she’s the dew-crystalled web
and the great furred spider inside it.
Maybe she’s bus exhaust and sirens.

You don’t need to know. For certain
she is not worried about haircuts or lists
or televised debates. She is not worried

about certainty. She isn’t here to smooth
anything over. She isn’t here to judge
or forgive. She has fog. She has seven deer

and a massive growling garbage truck.
She does not care about the research
you’ve done. She does not notice

your mouth. She herself doesn’t need one.
She herself doesn’t speak because
speaking goes one way only, is non-

dimensional, air-colored and leafless.
She is all leaves. She is all cisterns
of stone. She towers when she wants to.

Other times she mists-and-murmurs.
She sees you wanting her to absolve you.
She sees you making your sunrise resolutions:

good morning, restraint and improvement!
She finds you sweet, the way you might
find a vole or a small ceramic cactus sweet.

by Catherine Pierce
from Ecotheo Review

Steven Poole in The Guardian:

So are we really essentially the same animals as the early Homo sapiens hunting and gathering on the savannahs? Dartnell thinks so. “The fundamental aspects of what it means to be human – the hardware of our bodies and the software of our minds – haven’t changed.” This is, indeed, the assumption behind evolutionary psychology, which seeks to explain modern human behaviour in terms of what is hypothesised to have been adaptive for our cave-dwelling ancestors. But his mainframe-age metaphor of hardware and software is old hat and inaccurate. We now know that the human brain exhibits substantial neuroplasticity: in other words, the “software” can change the “hardware” it’s running on, as is not the case for any actual computer.

This “software” can also correct itself, which is to say that our thinking is corrigible: a fact that seems obvious in light of the history of disciplines such as mathematics, engineering, or indeed biology itself. Yet Dartnell, despite accepting the facts of cultural evolution, still avers that our “cognitive operating system has not had an update”, and worse, that we can’t do anything about many of its most characteristic errors.

This is the burden of his penultimate chapter about the familiar subject of cognitive biases. Deducing from news reports about violent crime that humans are unusually violent primates, for example, would be a case of “availability bias” – we attach more importance to examples of nastiness we can easily think of (those more “available” to memory) than to the untold examples of people being nice to each other that don’t make the headlines.

More here.

Brian Gallagher in Nautilus:

No, it’s not. Participants in our studies tell us that people are less kind, less nice, less honest, less good, that this has been happening their whole lives, that it’s been happening recently, and that it’s been happening everywhere. Which should make it pretty easy to find some evidence of this somewhere, and we find no evidence of it anywhere. In fact, we find pretty good evidence that it hasn’t happened. A big collection of archival data, going back all the way to 1949, suggests people believe morality is declining. People are asked questions like, “Do you think morality is declining?” and “Do you think people are less honest today than they were 50 years ago?” in 100 different ways, in dozens of different countries. And over and over again, people say, “Yes, people are less kind than they used to be. No, I’m not just saying that. This isn’t just nostalgia. This really happened.”

What’s the evidence that their perception is off? The answers to big “M” moral items—things like, “Do people kill each other as often as they used to?” or “Are people as likely to abuse their children?”—are no. That’s Steven Pinker’s work. But that’s also not primarily what people mean when they say that morality has declined. What they really mean is, “People don’t treat each other with respect anymore.” They’ll say things like, “It used to be you could leave your door unlocked at night, but now you can’t.”

More here.

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Here’s your chance to say what you want to the large number of highly educated readers that make up 3QD’s international audience. Several of our regular columnists have had to cut back or even completely quit their columns for 3QD because of other personal and professional commitments and so we are looking for a few new voices. We do not pay, but it is a good chance to draw attention to subjects you are interested in, and to get feedback from us and from our readers.

We would certainly love for our pool of writers to reflect the diversity of our readers in every way, including gender, age, ethnicity, race, sexual orientation, etc., and we encourage people of all kinds to apply. And we like unusual voices and varied viewpoints. So please send us something. What have you got to lose? Click on “Read more” below…

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Catherine Shoard in The Guardian:

The actor, 90, has long harboured the desire to write a thriller, and was inspired to do so by a news item, says his UK publisher, Hodder’s Rowena Webb, about “the discovery of uranium by workers on a dump in London’s East End”. The novel’s lead character is DCI Harry Taylor, who, according to the synopsis, is “called in when just such a package is found, mysteriously abandoned in Stepney and stolen before the police can reclaim it. As security agencies around the world go to red alert, it is former SAS man Harry and his small team from the Met who must race against time to find who has the nuclear material and what they plan to do with it.”

More here.

Leon Vlieger in The Inquisitive Biologist:

From the absurdist Terry-Gilliam-style cover to the provocative subtitle to my enjoyment of his previous book Are Dolphins Really Smart?—I had high hopes for this book. Justin Gregg is an Adjunct Professor lecturing on animal behaviour and cognition, and a Senior Research Associate with the Dolphin Communication Project, betraying his particular interest in marine mammals and animal language. Holding forth the provocative idea that our intelligence is a burden rather than a boon and that animals do it better, If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal combines well-aimed philosophical potshots at human exceptionalism with a gentle introduction to animal cognition. A blissfully easy read, this book had me in stitches more than once.

More here.

Dwarkesh Patel at The Lunar Society:

Marc Andreessen published a new essay about why AI will save the world. I had Marc on my podcast a few months ago (YouTube, Audio), and he was, as he is usually, very thoughtful and interesting. But in the case of AI, he fails to engage with the worries about AI misalignment. Instead, he substitutes aphorisms for arguments. He calls safety worriers cultists, questions their motives, and conflates their concerns with those of the woke “trust and safety” people.

I agree with his essay on a lot:

• • People grossly overstate the risks AI poses via misinformation and inequality.
  • Regulation is often counterproductive, and naively “regulating AI” is more likely to cause harm than good.
  • It would be really bad if China outpaces America in AI.
  • Technological progress throughout history has dramatically improved our quality of life. If we solve alignment, we can look forward to material and cultural abundance.

But Marc dismisses the concern that we may fail to control models, especially as they reach human level and beyond. And that’s where I disagree.

More here.

From Time Magazine:

Cormac McCarthy, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of often grisly, hypermasculine fiction died Tuesday at 89, in his Santa Fe, N.M. home. One of the most acclaimed—if reclusive—American writers of the last 50 years, McCarthy’s dark and devastating fiction centered on outsiders attempting to survive their often violent worlds.

…Here, the essential books to celebrate and understand McCarthy’s contributions to the literary canon.

Blood Meridian (1985)

Violence is the seeming lifeblood of Blood Meridian, McCarthy’s fifth novel, which is a macabre epic of the American West. Published in 1985, it centers on the harrowing experiences of a ruthless runaway known only as “the kid.” McCarthy’s protagonist comes of age as part of the Glanton gang, a group of outlaws who were notorious in the mid-19th century for murdering Indigenous peoples across Texas and Mexico. The result is a nightmarish fever dream of gang violence and robberies, scalp hunting and cold-blooded killings—one that disrupts any heroic or romantic fantasies of the frontier.

More here.

Norman Doidge in Tablet:

An Old Woman

An old woman grabs
hold of your sleeve
and tags along.

She wants a fifty paise coin.
She says she will take you
to the horseshoe shrine.

You’ve seen it already.
She hobbles along anyway
and tightens her grip on your shirt.

She won’t let you go.
You know how old women are.
They stick to you like a burr.

You turn around and Face her
with an air of finality.
You want to end the farse.

When you hear her say,
“What else can an old woman do
on hills as wretched as these?”

You look right at the sky
clear through the bullet holes
she has for her eyes.

And as you look on
the cracks that begin around her eyes
spread beyond her skin.

And the hills crack.
And the temples crack.
And the sky falls

with a plateglass clatter
around the shatter-proof crone
who stands alone.

And you are reduced
to so much small change
in her hand.

by Arun Kolatkar
from Jejuri
New York Review Books, 1974

Abe Silberstein in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

In theory, a fundamentalist religious dictatorship should not be a hospitable environment for an extraordinary artistic flowering whose treasures continue—four decades later—to please, confound, and reinvent themselves to audiences around the world. Yet this seems to be exactly the case with Iran’s cinematic output since 1979, when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and his followers consolidated power in the wake of the Shah’s departure. (The Shah was himself a tyrant, but of the kind who sought to project a modern and art-friendly image.) We are all familiar with artists, writers, and filmmakers circumventing official and de facto censors to produce subversive masterpieces. But the consistency of Iranian cinema’s march across the world stage over the last 30-plus years suggests that something more powerful than individual creativity is at play—rather, a kind of relentless cultural force inexorably punching through whatever obstacles an authoritarian government places in its way.

More here.