Brooke Allen in The Hudson Review:
The last time I wrote about James Baldwin, in the late 1990s, I concluded that his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, was his best, and that his second, Giovanni’s Room, was sentimental, artificial, and populated by stock figures—in fact I agreed with Norman Mailer’s assessment that the novel, dealing openly in Eisenhower’s America with homosexuality, was “brave” but “bad.” Now hailed as a seminal work, it had been turned down by Knopf, who had published Go Tell It on the Mountain. (The novel was eventually published by Dial.) Baldwin assumed that Knopf had expected him to take up the mantle of “Negro writer” and stick to racial subjects, which Giovanni’s Room did not address; or perhaps they had been made nervous by the gay content. But Henry Carlisle, the editor who ruled against it, was not an unworldly man, and I think one can take at face value his objection that the book lacked credible characters and would not enhance the author’s reputation.
More here.
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.
It’s not easy to move around New York City as Zohran Mamdani anymore.
Three months after the 1929 Hebron massacre {which saw the deaths of nearly 70 Jews and scores of others maimed or wounded}, the celebrated historian Hans Kohn – active in the Zionist movement since 1909 – wrote the following letter: “I feel that I can no longer remain a leading official within the Zionist Organization… We pretend to be innocent victims. Of course, the Arabs attacked us this past August. Since they have no armies, they could not obey the rules of war. They perpetrated all the barbaric acts that are characteristic of a colonial revolt. But we are obliged to look into the deeper cause of this revolt. We have been in Palestine for twelve years [since the start of the British occupation] without having even once made a serious attempt at seeking through negotiations the consent of the indigenous people. We have been relying exclusively upon Great Britain’s military might. We have set ourselves goals which by their very nature had to lead to conflict with Arabs… for twelve years we pretended that the Arabs did not exist and were glad when we were not reminded of their existence.” (Jewish National and University Library 376/224, Kohn to Berthold Feiwel [1875–1937]. Jerusalem, 21 Nov. 1929).
S
You know you’re in a Cynthia Ozick short story when the wind is merciless and the leaves have dropped. It may already be snowing. In “Bloodshed,” we are greeted by the “icy scenes” that a gun-toting rationalist sees from a Greyhound bus on his way to a “town of the hasidim” outside New York City, where he is ultimately shamed and disarmed by a local rebbe. In “The Biographer’s Hat,” snowflakes adorn the fur collar of a crooked biographer who mouches off a proofreader and persuades her to falsely insert herself into his subject’s history. “A Mercenary” concludes with the haunting vision of a man lying dead “under the stone-white hanging stars of Poland…. Against the stones and under the snow.”
It would be easy to insist that LLMs are just objects, obviously. As an engineer I get it—it doesn’t matter how convincing the human affectations are, underneath the conversational interface is still nothing but data, algorithms, and matrix multiplication. Any projection of subject-hood is clearly just anthropomorphic nonsense. 
T
Post-independence, Pakistan faced deep identity dilemmas. Should it be a secular Muslim-majority state or an Islamic theocracy? The 1971 secession of East Pakistan into Bangladesh exposed the fragility of religious unity in the face of linguistic and ethnic differences. As Akeel Bilgrami (Secularism, Identity and Enchantment, 2014) observes, the premise of a single Muslim identity was flawed when confronted with South Asia’s diversity.
This much we know: Smartphones are making us dumber. Compelling essays suggest we 
The main point made in the paper is that, to be meaningful, general intelligence should refer to the kind of intelligence seen in biological agents, and AGI should be given a corresponding meaning in artificial ones. Importantly, any general intelligence must have three attributes – autonomy, self-motivation, and continuous learning – that make it inherently uncertain and uncontrollable. As such, it is no more possible to perfectly align an AI agent with human preferences than it is to align the preferences of individual humans with each other. The best that can be achieved is bounded alignment, defined as demonstrating behavior that is almost always acceptable – though not necessarily agreeable – for almost everyone who encounters the AI agent, which is the degree of alignment we expect from human peers, and which is typically developed through consent and socialization rather than coercion. A crucial point is that, while alignment may refer in the abstract to values and objectives, it can only be validated in terms of behavior, which is the only observable.
ON THE SURFACE, Pan is the coming-of-age story of an ordinary teenage boy struggling with severe panic attacks while doing ordinary teenage things (losing his virginity, fretting over his popularity, negotiating rides to strip malls in the wake of his parents’ divorce) in suburban Illinois. On another level, it’s about a teenager who has possibly been possessed by Pan, the ancient Greek god of the wild, and who falls in with a cult of troubled young drug addicts who attempt to exorcise him.
Among the most pressing problems societies face today are economic inequality and the erosion of democratic norms and institutions. In fact the two problems—inequality and democratic erosion—are linked. In a large cross-national statistical study of risk factors for democratic erosion, we establish that economic inequality is one of the strongest predictors of where and when democracy erodes. Even wealthy and longstanding democracies are vulnerable if they are highly unequal (though national wealth might provide some resiliency). The association between inequality and risk of democratic backsliding is robust, and holds under different measures and structures of both income inequality and wealth inequality. The association is unlikely to be a case of reverse causation. For concerned citizens seeking to understand why so many democracies are eroding and how to stop this process, our study indicates that policies for ameliorating inequality are a promising path forward.
The fall of Syria’s prisons and its regime prompted a wave of thought regarding the very notion of carceral collapse—no longer an aspiration for the oppressed but an inclement reality—throughout the region and diaspora. Palestinian factions debated the implications for the 1,784 Palestinian detainees who disappeared in Assad’s prisons, their fate unknown. On the other hand, Sudanese activists took to X in solidarity, recalling their own scenes of prison liberation in Khartoum in the aftermath of the 2019 revolution that toppled the long-standing dictatorship of Omar al-Bashir. In the United Kingdom, Egyptian activists gathered to reiterate their demands for the release of the over sixty thousand political prisoners in President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s prisons, including British Egyptian activist and writer Alaa Abdel Fattah. One former detainee recalled the horrors of Sednaya as “no less horrific” than what he witnessed in Egyptian prisons.