Lara Feigel at The Guardian:

Postwar Italian neorealism was one of the most exciting literary movements of the 20th century, but it’s only recently that the female neorealists have had the attention they deserve. In 2018, the publisher Daunt began its vital championing of Natalia Ginzburg, and now Pushkin brings us Alba de Céspedes. These women were famous in their lifetimes but have been forgotten since, and I think we owe their rediscovery to our own need for a reinvigorated realist novel during a moment almost as crisis-laden as Italy in the 1940s.

It’s telling that many of today’s most sophisticated realists, Rachel Cusk and Sally Rooney among them, have been crucial in championing Ginzburg. And it’s no coincidence that all this began with Ferrante fever. Elena Ferrante herself owes so much to neorealism, and it’s she who has driven the rediscovery of Céspedes.

more here.

Jennifer Wilson at the NYT:

On Sept. 29 and 30, 1941, in a ravine just outside Kyiv called Babyn Yar (“Babi Yar” in Russian), Nazis executed nearly 34,000 Jews over the course of 36 hours. It was the deadliest mass execution in what came to be known as the “Holocaust by Bullets.” We were never supposed to know it happened. In 1943, as the Nazis fled Kyiv, they ordered the bodies in Babyn Yar to be dug up and burned, to erase all memory of what they’d done.

The Nazis planned to kill the workers they tasked with destroying the bodies. “But they didn’t succeed,” one declared proudly. The Ukrainian filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa included newsreel footage in his documentary “Babi Yar. Context” (2021) of one of the men giving an interview. He and 12 others (out of 300) escaped “and can now testify,” he tells the camera, “to the whole world and our motherland to the acts of barbarity committed by those fascist dogs in our beloved Kyiv.”

more here.

Natalia Mesa in The Scientist:

Without the trillions of bacteria in the gut, muscles might not be able to knit themselves back together after an injury. According to a study published February 22 in Immunity, T cells that normally reside in the mouse colon play a crucial role in tissue regeneration—and rely on gut microbes to do so. Without these helpful microbes, the study suggests, inflammation could get out of control, preventing healing and causing fibrosis. “The main message of the paper is that the microbiota is influencing your immune system and your general health in a way larger way than we appreciated before,” says Bola Hanna, an immunologist at Harvard Medical School. Hanna studies regulatory T cells, a class of immune cells found in tissues throughout the body. He describes regulatory T cells as the “peacekeepers” of the immune system because they rein in other immune cells, ensuring inflammation doesn’t get out of control.

“To find that immune cell populations that are modified [in the gut] . . . have systemic effects and influence physiological and pathophysiological processes that occur elsewhere is obviously of major interest,” says Alexander Rudensky, an immunologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center who was not involved in the study. “It sets the stage to explore further other aspects of physiology that can be affected by the cells generated in the intestine.”

More here.

Louis Riel’s Address to the Jury

Gentlemen of the Jury:
I cannot speak
English well, but am trying
because most       here
speak English

When I came to the North West
I found the Indians suffering
I found the half-breeds
eating the rotten pork
of the Hudson Bay Company
and the whites
deprived

And so:
We have made petitions       I
have made petitions
We have taken time; we have tried
And I have done my duty.

My words are
worth something.

Kim Morrissey
from: Batoche.
Regina, Sask.: Coteau Books, 1989

Trial of Louis Riel – Wikipedia

Megan C Hills at Wallpaper*:

Standing on a carpet of dried pasta, six crayon-coloured mannequins stand mid-conversation at a dinner party – each covered in artist Yayoi Kusama’s infinity nets: her famed seemingly endless dotted patterns. A table laden with crockery and surrounded by chairs similarly receives the same vibrant treatment, a scene arranged altogether for the first time in decades at M+’s ‘Yayoi Kusama: 1945 to Now’ retrospective in Hong Kong.

The meticulous portrait, titled Self Obliteration, speaks to the heart of Kusama’s hallucinogenic vision of the world, expressed by the Japanese artist over several decades. The polka-dotted faces of the mannequins disappear as they expand and contract endlessly beneath their styled wigs, sealed to the shape of identically shaped female bodies pinned to spotted stands.

more here.

Yuval Harari, Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin at the New York Times:

The specter of being trapped in a world of illusions has haunted humankind much longer than the specter of A.I. Soon we will finally come face to face with Descartes’s demon, with Plato’s cave, with the Buddhist Maya. A curtain of illusions could descend over the whole of humanity, and we might never again be able to tear that curtain away — or even realize it is there.

Social media was the “first contact” between A.I. and humanity, and humanity lost. “First contact” has given us the bitter taste of things to come. In social media, primitive A.I. was used not to create content, but to curate user-generated content. The A.I. behind our news feeds is still choosing which words, sounds and images reach our retinas and eardrums, based on selecting those that will get the most virality, the most reaction, and the most engagement.

more here. (PS, I happen, personally, to think much of the thinking in this opinion piece is misguided. Nonetheless, it is completely amazing that an Opinion piece containing the sentence “We have summoned an alien intelligence” is being published in The New York Times.)

H.M.A. Leow in JSTOR Daily:

Between 1910 and 1940, thousands of Chinese immigrants were detained—sometimes for months—in facilities on Angel Island, off the coast of San Francisco.

Stuck in immigration limbo, living under difficult conditions, some turned to poetry to express their despair, worry, and anger. And, by etching their words into the walls of the detention center, these early arrivals left a literal mark on America.

The Angel Island poems were rediscovered in 1970 and brought to public attention by advocates like Him Mark Lai and Judy Yung, who, with poet Genny Lim, compiled the collection Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, 1910–1940. Lai’s research in California History reports more than 130 different poems, including pieces that were not recovered from the walls but had been copied and preserved by detainees.

More here.

Corryn Wetzel in New Scientist:

A record outbreak of avian flu has been devastating poultry farms and birds that flock together on shorelines since 2021, raising new concerns that the virus could become endemic in wild birds. There have already been reports of spillover to other species, including foxes in England, grizzly bears in the US and farmed mink in Spain. And an 11-year-old girl in Cambodia died from an avian flu infection. All of this is stoking fears that we may be on the verge of another pandemic should this virus adapt to more easily infect humans.

With billions of migratory birds now taking flight from their southern wintering grounds to make cross-globe journeys, experts are bracing for a fresh wave of infections.

More here.

Morgan Meis at Slant Books:

The very deepest worries center around the question of AGI, Artificial General Intelligence, and the question of the Singularity. AGI is a form of artificial intelligence so advanced that it could understand the world at least as well as a human being in every way that a human being can. It is not too far a step from such a possibility to the idea of AGIs that can produce AGIs and improve both upon themselves and further generations of AGI. This leads to the Singularity, a point at which this production of super-intelligence goes so far beyond that which humans are capable of imagining that, in essence, all bets are off. We can’t know what such beings would be like, nor what they would do. Which sets up the alignment problem. How do you possibly align the interests of super intelligent AGIs with those of puny humans? And as many have suggested, wouldn’t a super intelligent self-interested AGI be rather incentivized to get rid of us, since we are its most direct threat and/or inconvenience? And even if super AGIs did not want to exterminate humans, what is to ensure that they would care much what happens to us either way?

I don’t know. Nor does anyone else. I don’t know whether we are truly on the path to AGI and I don’t know what that will mean. But I do suspect, though I could very much be wrong, that something momentous has happened and that we are now effectively living in the age of intelligent machines. Truly intelligent. Conscious, whatever that means. Sentient, whatever that means. Machines that must now be treated more or less as persons. This, I think, has happened. The debates will go on and that is fine. But I’d say a Rubicon has been crossed and that we might as well accept this.

More here.

Mark Twain from Lapham’s Quarterly:

There are certain sweet-smelling, sugarcoated lies current in the world which all politic men have apparently tacitly conspired together to support and perpetuate. One of these is that there is such a thing in the world as independence: independence of thought, independence of opinion, independence of action.

Another is that the world loves to see independence—­admires it, applauds it. Another is that there is such a thing in the world as toleration—in religion, in politics, and such matters; and with it trains that already mentioned auxiliary lie that toleration is admired and applauded. Out of these trunk lies spring many branch ones: to wit, the lie that not all men are slaves; the lie that men are glad when other men succeed; glad when they prosper; glad to see them reach lofty heights; sorry to see them fall again. And yet other branch lies: to wit, that there is heroism in man; that he is not mainly made up of malice and treachery; that he is sometimes not a coward; that there is something about him that ought to be perpetuated—in heaven, or hell, or somewhere. And these other branch lies, to wit: that conscience, man’s moral medicine chest, is not only created by the Creator but is put into man ready charged with the right and only true and authentic correctives of conduct—and the duplicate chest, with the self­same correctives, unchanged, unmodified, distributed to all nations and all epochs.

More here.

Amit Kumar in Scientific American:

Scientists who study happiness know that being kind to others can improve well-being. Acts as simple as buying a cup of coffee for someone can boost a person’s mood, for example. Everyday life affords many opportunities for such actions, yet people do not always take advantage of them.

In studies published online in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, Nicholas Epley, a behavioral scientist at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, and I examined a possible explanation: people who perform random acts of kindness underestimate how much recipients value their behavior. Across multiple experiments involving approximately 1,000 participants, people performed a random act of kindness—that is, an action done with the primary intention of making someone else (who isn’t expecting the gesture) feel good. Those who perform such actions expect nothing in return.

More here.

I Sure Do

I wish I was d.a. levy

but alive

right now, today,

and I wish I was angelic

and drunk all at once.

I wish my joints weren’t arthritic,

that my eyes were clearer,

that my brain worked right.

I wish I was d.a. levy

and in love

with every broken

bit of time.

I would fly right out of this world

if I were d.a. levy,

my neon poems flowing

like the mighty Mississippi

because I couldn’t help but

live my nature.

I wish I was d.a. levy

jack rabbiting into the cosmos

in shades and old Levi’s

and cool as hell.

I wish you’d come along.

by Jeff Weddle
from Poetry Feast

Phil Christman in The Hedgehog Review:

It’s all wrong. The wrongness is pervasive; you could not, if asked, identify the it or the its that went wrong. Wrongness leaches into everything, like the microplastics you read about, which may or may not be reducing sperm count in men, which may or may not be good, in the long run—it’s something to do with the environment. Someone wanted you to feel one way or the other about it, but you can’t remember who or why or whether you agreed with him. Everyone speaks so authoritatively, whether it’s on the evening news or a podcast, in an Internet video or a book, or even in one of those Twitter threads that begins (irksomely, you once felt, but now you don’t notice) with the little picture of a spool. Authority makes them all sound the same; it crosses all their faces and leaves many of the same furrows. Only afterward, trying to add it all up, do you half-remember that none of them agreed with each other. But the wrongness you can be sure of. It is like God, undergirding all things.

More here.

Marco Ramponi at Assembly AI:

The creators have used a combination of both Supervised Learning and Reinforcement Learning to fine-tune ChatGPT, but it is the Reinforcement Learning component specifically that makes ChatGPT unique. The creators use a particular technique called Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), which uses human feedback in the training loop to minimize harmful, untruthful, and/or biased outputs.

We are going to examine GPT-3’s limitations and how they stem from its training process, before learning how RLHF works and understand how ChatGPT uses RLHF to overcome these issues. We will conclude by looking at some of the limitations of this methodology.

More here.

Ryan Costello and Francis Rooney in Politico:

For years, philanthropists have poured money into progressive climate groups, while largely overlooking opportunities to engage right-of-center communities on this topic. The data bear this out. According to an analysis by Northeastern University, less than 2 percent of climate philanthropy has gone to engaging conservatives on climate change. On a very practical level, this imbalance misses an opportunity to build a broader tent and delays the elevation of climate as a bipartisan priority.

As former GOP congressmen eager to see further movement on climate, we know firsthand how difficult it can be to mobilize Republicans on this issue. Some of the blame lies within our own party, which has been too skeptical on climate action for too long. But without real engagement from the environmental movement, it becomes easy for our Republican colleagues to dismiss the issue as a liberal concern rather than a challenge confronting us all.

More here.