Kevin Birmingham in The New York Times:

There’s a moment deep in the Marquis de Sade’s novel “120 Days of Sodom” when a libertine laments the numbness of having committed every possible debauchery. “How many times, by God, have I not longed to be able to assail the sun, snatch it out of the universe, make a general darkness or use that star to burn the world!” The most destructive binge has limits, he realizes. Just knowing that will dampen the best sadistic orgy.

Sade toiled to find his imagination’s limits. In 37 days, he wrote 157,000 words on a 40-foot scroll while imprisoned in the Bastille, creating, he bragged, “the most impure tale ever written since the world began.” “120 Days of Sodom” chronicles four months of depravity involving multiple victims in a remote castle. Sade wrote in secret, by candlelight, covering the scroll in microscopic script. When he was suddenly transferred to a mental asylum days before revolutionaries stormed the Bastille in 1789, he hid his unfinished scroll in a crevice of his cell wall.

More here.

Nienke Groskamp in the European Review of Books:

In Hound of the Baskervilles (1902) by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes examines a note written on a snippet from The Times. He concludes its author was an « educated man who wished to pose as an uneducated one, and his effort to conceal his own writing suggests that that writing might be known. » Dr. Mortimer calls it guesswork, but Holmes disagrees: « It is the scientific use of the imagination. »

On the cusp of science and imagination — that is where Holmes operates. And, like many other fictional brilliant crime-solvers — whether their talent comes from genius-level observational skills (like Monk or The Mentalist’s Patrick Jane) or psychic abilities (like Medium’s Allison DuBois) — he works outside of the institutional police structure. On BBC’s Sherlock, Officer Lestrade refuses to let Sherlock do a medical examination, telling him, « I’m breaking every rule letting you in here. » Holmes responds: « Yes … Because you need me. » Lestrade lowers his eyes in resignation. « Yes, I do. God help me. »

Holmes is fictional, but the police’s openness to — even dependence on — the perspective of unconventional outsiders most definitely isn’t.

More here.

Heidi Ledford & Max Kozlov in Nature:

Researchers have made eggs from the cells of male mice — and showed that, once fertilized and implanted into female mice, the eggs can develop into seemingly healthy, fertile offspring.

The approach, announced on 8 March at the Third International Summit on Human Genome Editing in London, has not yet been published and is a long way from being used in humans. But it is an early proof-of-concept for a technique that raises the possibility of a way to treat some causes of infertility — or even allow for single-parent embryos. “This is a significant advance with significant potential applications,” says Keith Latham, a developmental biologist at Michigan State University in East Lansing.

More here.

Zvi Mowshowitz at Less Wrong:

There are good reasons to worry about AI. This includes good reasons to worry about AI wiping out all value in the universe, or AI killing everyone, or other similar very bad outcomes.

There are also good reasons that AGI, or otherwise transformational AI, might not come to pass for a long time.

As I say in the Q&A section later, I do not consider imminent transformational AI inevitable in our lifetimes: Some combination of ‘we run out of training data and ways to improve the systems, and AI systems max out at not that much more powerful than current ones’ and ‘turns out there are regulatory and other barriers that prevent AI from impacting that much of life or the economy that much’ could mean that things during our lifetimes turn out to be not that strange. These are definitely world types my model says you should consider plausible.

More here.

[See also: AI: Practical Advice For The Worried]

Olga Tokarczuk at Salmagundi:

I would like to focus on a special way of predicting the future, and to invite you to take a trip down paths that are rarely trodden by humanists. As we are living at a time of unusual uncertainty and anxiety about what will happen next, this topic is on many people’s minds, prompting us to ask: “What is our future going to be like?” And also: “Can we foresee it to any degree at all?” When I say “our future” I’m not thinking of the next few years, but rather about the gradual processes whose effects will be visible several centuries from now.
In ages past, various ways of predicting the future developed dynamically – dating back to oracles and predictions based on observations of nature, or by apparently communicating with supernatural forces corresponding to the ongoing demands of society. I shall provide some examples from the ancient world, where alongside astrology, with its centuries-old tradition, various schools of “something-mancy” co-existed, some more and some less obvious. The more obvious ones include oneiromancy, as in divination by dreams; arithmancy, which uses numbers for predictive purposes; cheiromancy, forreading the future from the palm lines; or ceromancy, which bases its predictions on wax poured into water, and which in Poland is also a familiar folk custom associated with St. Andrew’s Eve.

more here.

Patricia Hampl at The American Scholar:

She too was a link, though a precious one, the only living connection to the ghost I stalked. Katherine Mansfield. The romantic renegade writer, older by five years at her death at 34 in January 1923 than I was/am on this June day in 1975.

My first “trip abroad” (a phrase then still common, oddly antique now). The journey from home in St. Paul had been made for this encounter, to interview Mansfield’s best friend, possibly a one-time lover, it was said—would the girl burdened with flowers and tape recorder nerve up to inquire about that ?

LM was the ancient leftover not only of their relationship, but of their world. She, Leslie Moore, had been coaxed into writing a memoir—Katherine Mansfield: The Memories of LM—by the man wearing the stiff boater. And now she had agreed to let “a young American” who had read her book meet its author for an interview.

more here.

Next Year or Someday

I’ll see you at the Farmer’s Market
moving slowly through the crowd – there will
be a crowd then among the stalls, shoppers
touching tomatoes glowing earth-blood colors,
asking unmasked farmers about their climate-year.
On a festive day I’ll join you to watch
the Miwuk dancers stomp and spin, fringes
moving with the drums. Back in the time of masks,
we traded Columbus for Indigenous Peoples
Day. We brought Dia de los Muertos to the Market,
singers cloaking their fado-mariachi.
Back then, I wondered if it was infringement,
being outside our pod under sky
with the dancers chanting their songs, a flute
exhaling, everyone stirring the air to particulate
eddies of grief and joy. Beauty, love, life
always at risk. Isn’t that what grounds the ancient
songs? Next year or someday we’ll gather again
to celebrate what we’ve lived, lost, and found.

by Taylor Graham
from Poets Online

From The Morning News:

California’s population growth was one of defining trends of 20th-century America. From 1900 to 1950 the population increased 500%, going from two million to ten million. Then things really exploded, and by the year 2000 the state’s population had climbed to 34 million, making California the most populous state in America. People have been lured west for a variety of reasons, from the gold rush to Hollywood dreams, but beyond riches and fame there has been also the promise of the sunny California lifestyle, one captured by LIFE staff photographer Nina Leen in a piece that ran in the Oct. 22, 1945 issue.

The unreservedly enthusiastic thirteen-page essay was titled “The California Way of Life,” and it’s not hard to imagine that the article affected some readers the way news of gold in Sutter’s Mill did in the 1800s. The story began with these words, which could have come from a state tourist brochure:

Californians live in a land where the sun shines 355 days a year, where the thermometer seldom falls below 46 degrees, and where towering mountains and endless beaches flank a countryside of incredible fertility. Against the background of these unique natural advantages, Californians have evolved a unique way of life which is physically the most comfortable and attractive way of life enjoyed in any region in the U.S.

It’s worth noting that this story came out just a few short months after the end of World War II, a time when readers might thirst for a new beginning. (The issue also included a story an another feel-good imagination-tickler: “victory lingerie.”)

More here.

Marta Zaraska in Quanta Magazine:

Loneliness can be difficult to study empirically because it is entirely subjective. Social isolation, a related condition, is different — it’s an objective measure of how few relationships a person has. The experience of loneliness has to be self-reported, although researchers have developed tools such as the UCLA Loneliness Scale to help with assessing the depths of an individual’s feelings. From such work, it’s clear that the physical and psychological toll of loneliness across the globe is profound. In one survey, 22% of Americans and 23% of British people said they felt lonely always or often. And that was before the pandemic. As of October 2020, 36% of Americans reported “serious loneliness.”

As the researchers described in 2019, in comparison to a control group, the socially isolated team lost volume in their prefrontal cortex — the region at the front of the brain, just behind the forehead, that is chiefly responsible for decision-making and problem-solving. They also had lower levels of brain-derived neurotrophic factor, a protein that nurtures the development and survival of nerve cells in the brain. The reduction persisted for at least a month and a half after the team’s return from Antarctica.

More here.

Scott Alexander in Astral Codex Ten:

Someone asks: why is “Jap” a slur? It’s the natural shortening of “Japanese person”, just as “Brit” is the natural shortening of “British person”. Nobody says “Brit” is a slur. Why should “Jap” be?

My understanding: originally it wasn’t a slur. Like any other word, you would use the long form (“Japanese person”) in dry formal language, and the short form (“Jap”) in informal or emotionally charged language. During World War II, there was a lot of informal emotionally charged language about Japanese people, mostly negative. The symmetry broke. Maybe “Japanese person” was used 60-40 positive vs. negative, and “Jap” was used 40-60. This isn’t enough to make a slur, but it’s enough to make a vague connotation. When people wanted to speak positively about the group, they used the slightly-more-positive-sounding “Japanese people”; when they wanted to speak negatively, they used the slightly-more-negative-sounding “Jap”.

At some point, someone must have commented on this explicitly: “Consider not using the word ‘Jap’, it makes you sound hostile”. Then anyone who didn’t want to sound hostile to the Japanese avoided it, and anyone who did want to sound hostile to the Japanese used it more. We started with perfect symmetry: both forms were 50-50 positive negative. Some chance events gave it slight asymmetry: maybe one form was 60-40 negative. Once someone said “That’s a slur, don’t use it”, the symmetry collapsed completely and it became 95-5 or something.

More here.

Nicola Jones in Nature:

After years of debates and discussions, nations have agreed on a High Seas Treaty to protect marine biodiversity and provide oversight of international waters. It is being lauded by researchers as an important step for conservation that encourages international research collaboration without hindering science.

“We’re ecstatic,” says Kristina Gjerde, who researches marine environmental law at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey, California. “This long-awaited treaty contains many of the vital things we need to safeguard our oceans.”

The final wording of the agreement was hashed out by delegates of the United Nations Intergovernmental Conference on Marine Biodiversity of Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction (BBNJ) at the end of a two-week meeting in New York City.

More here.

Jonathan Haidt in After Babel:

In May 2014, Greg Lukianoff invited me to lunch to talk about something he was seeing on college campuses that disturbed him. Greg is the president of FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression), and he has worked tirelessly since 2001 to defend the free speech rights of college students. That almost always meant pushing back against administrators who didn’t want students to cause trouble, and who justified their suppression of speech with appeals to the emotional “safety” of students—appeals that the students themselves didn’t buy. But in late 2013, Greg began to encounter new cases in which students were pushing to ban speakers, punish people for ordinary speech, or implement policies that would chill free speech. These students arrived on campus in the fall of 2013 already accepting the idea that books, words, and ideas could hurt them. Why did so many students in 2013 believe this, when there was little sign of such beliefs in 2011?

More here.

At Banagher

Then all of a sudden there appears to me
The journeyman tailor who was my antecedent:
Up on a table, cross-legged, ripping out

A garment he must recut or resew,
His lips tight back, a thread between his teeth,
Keeping his counsel always, giving none,

His eyelids steady as wrinkled horn or iron.
Self-absenting, both migrant and ensconced;
Admitted into kitchens, into clothes

His touch has the power to turn to cloth again—
All of a sudden he appears to me,
Unopen, unmendacious, unillumined.

………………………………… *

So more power to him on the job there, ill at ease
Under my scrutiny in spite of years
Of being inscrutable as he threaded needles

Or matched the facings, linings, hems and seams.
He holds the needle just off center, squinting,
And licks the thread and licks and sweeps it through,

Then takes his time to draw both threads out even,
Plucking them sharply twice. Then back to stitching.
Does he ever question what it all amounts to?

Or ever will? Or care where he lays his head?
My Lord Buddha of Banagher, the way
Is opener for you being in it.

by Seamus Heaney
from The Spirit Level

Suleiman Al-Bustani at The Baffler:

UNTIL THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, The Iliad had only been translated into European languages. By 1914, however, the situation had changed. Suleiman Al-Bustani’s 1904 Arabic version was just one among many translations into non-European languages—Armenian, Bengali, Urdu, Turkish, Gujrati, and Marathi, among others. This sudden interest in an ancient Greek epic poem might be understood from an anti-colonial perspective. It reflects the belief, held by many intellectuals of the period, that the symbolic power of Homer could be used to resist European claims to authority in an era of imperial expansion. If Homer’s epic is born, as Bustani argues, of the four corners of the world, the principle so central to Western Europe’s “civilizing mission”—that the ideas of Ancient Greece are the cultural foundation of the Christian West—loses some legitimacy.

These translations were also far more than responses to Europe. For Bustani, The Iliad represented an inquiry into the Jahiliya of the Greeks: the period in Greek history that corresponds to the period in Arab history marked by the absence of divine guidance, prior to the revelation of the Quran.

more here.

Laura Jacobs at The New Criterion:

The map of Balanchine’s life once he left Russia in 1924 and until he finally settled into the New York City Ballet in 1948 may read as a kind of wandering, but his life as an artist was made of circles: the revolving of the repertory, the return to old ballets, the rethinking and recalibration of steps and phrases. To the dismay of his audience, for instance, Balanchine pared back the iconic Apollon musagète, his breakthrough of 1928. Again and again he rechoreographed Stravinsky’s Le Baiser de la fée (based on heartbroken melodies by Tchaikovsky), trying to find the right form for its story of a child kissed into art and thus frozen out of a normal life—his story. And despite the astonishing breadth of his repertory, it was dominated by what one might call the waltz step of desire–love–loss. In fact, this was a vortex Balanchine needed. The centrifugal pull of the waltz, its three-four time as self-generating as the tide, rolling and turning, drawing one in and under, was pure energy.

more here.

Caitlin Gibson in The Washington Post: