Dominique Routhier in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

Encouraged by the election of Joe Biden, the COVID-19 vaccine, and the so-called “major opportunity” of smart technology, commentators and investors now predict that the economy will rebound from the pandemic downturn, or even accelerate, once the “exogenous” shock caused by the coronavirus has been absorbed. But is this a plausible future scenario?

In his recent book, Smart Machines and Service Work: Automation in an Age of Stagnation, the Los Angeles–based Marxist critic Jason E. Smith makes the case that the dominant narrative of a tech-driven recovery is fundamentally out of tune with economic realities. When the economic data is properly disentangled from faulty definitions of productivity and untenable assumptions about perpetual economic growth, it becomes clear that we are not on the verge of an age of prodigious wealth creation spurred by smart machines. Rather, as the book title suggests, we are living through an age of stagnation with no reversal in sight.

More here.

Christian Kleinbub at The Brooklyn Rail:

In the popular imagination, the name Leonardo da Vinci conjures many things. In traditional textbooks, he epitomizes the concept of the “Renaissance man,” capable of knowing and doing everything. Another view has it that he was a prototypical engineer and scientist—inventor of tanks, helicopters, self-perpetuating machines, and urban infrastructure—and thus the forerunner of much of what we deem essential in our supposedly secular, technology-driven world. Art historians generally describe him as the key figure in a new phase in European painting, attuned to the portrayal of psychology and the subjectivity of sight, all while exercising an unparalleled naturalism. But, despite these things, there has always been another image of Leonardo, one that associated him with hidden things, esoteric knowledge beyond common perceptions. In Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code (2003), Leonardo figures as a guardian of a forbidden secret, keeping alive the dangerous knowledge that Christ married Mary Magdalene and had a child by her. In the context of Brown’s thriller, Leonardo is a knower of the unknown, a keeper of truths that must remain encrypted by means of his famous mirror writing. Because Leonardo’s secret could potentially overturn orthodox Christian beliefs, his perpetuation of it paradoxically meshes with his reputation as a harbinger of the modern world. Like a Nostradamus, he anticipates history, hiding the keys to understanding things that are beyond the grasp of his contemporaries and a challenge for more enlightened ages.

more here.

Vauhini Vara at The Believer:

Last year I became fascinated with an artificial intelligence model that was being trained to write human-like text. The model was called GPT-3, short for Generative Pre-Trained Transformer 3; if you fed it a bit of text, it could complete a piece of writing, by predicting the words that should come next.

I sought out examples of GPT 3’s work, and they astonished me. Some of them could easily be mistaken for texts written by a human hand. In others, the language was weird, off-kilter—but often poetically so, almost truer than writing any human would produce. (When the New York Times had GPT-3 come up with a fake Modern Love column, it wrote, “We went out for dinner. We went out for drinks. We went out for dinner again. We went out for drinks again. We went out for dinner and drinks again.” I had never read such an accurate Modern Love in my life.)

more here.

Caitlin Flanagan in The Atlantic:

Are you someone who enjoys the unsolicited opinions of strangers and acquaintances? If so, I can’t recommend cancer highly enough. You won’t even have the first pathology report in your hands before the advice comes pouring in. Laugh and the world laughs with you; get cancer and the world can’t shut its trap. Stop eating sugar; keep up your weight with milkshakes. Listen to a recent story on NPR; do not read a recent story in Time magazine. Exercise—but not too vigorously; exercise—hard, like Lance Armstrong. Join a support group, make a collage, make a collage in a support group, collage the shit out of your cancer. Do you live near a freeway or drink tap water or eat food microwaved on plastic plates? That’s what caused it. Do you ever think about suing? Do you ever wonder whether, if you’d just let some time pass, the cancer would have gone away on its own?

Before I got cancer, I thought I understood how the world worked, or at least the parts that I needed to know about. But when I got cancer, my body broke down so catastrophically that I stopped trusting what I thought and believed. I felt that I had to listen when people told me what to do, because clearly I didn’t know anything. Much of the advice was bewildering, and all of it was anxiety-producing. In the end, because so many people contradicted one another, I was able to ignore most of them. But there was one warning I heard from a huge number of people, almost every day, and sometimes two or three times a day: I had to stay positive. People who beat cancer have a great positive attitude. It’s what distinguishes the survivors from the dead.

…When I began to understand that attitude doesn’t have anything to do with survival, I felt myself coming up out of deep water. I didn’t cause my cancer by having a bad attitude, and I wasn’t going to cure it by having a good one. And then Coscarelli told me the whole truth about cancer. If you’re ready, I will tell it to you. Cancer occurs when a group of cells divide in rapid and abnormal ways. Treatments are successful if they interfere with that process.

That’s it, that’s the whole equation.

More here.

From Nature:

A major focus of modern medicine is treating existing conditions, but a promising approach is to try to detect elevated susceptibility to a condition before it becomes a diagnosable disease. “The pre-disease state, where someone has increased susceptibility to developing diseases, such as cancer, is widely considered the best period for intervening,” explains Yoshinori Kono, project leader at Kewpie. “Treating disease is important, but preventing disease before it strikes will reduce healthcare costs and improve quality of life.”

In the search for reliable ways to detect the pre-disease state, short snippets of non-coding RNA, known as microRNAs (miRNAs), have great potential. First discovered in 1993 in nematodes, miRNAs help to regulate gene expression.

Many human diseases, including cancer, exhibit imbalances in miRNA expression. In particular, by controlling the expression of oncogenic and tumour-suppressor proteins, miRNAs are thought to play an important role in the development of cancers by aiding tumour cell proliferation, growth-suppressor evasion and cell-death resistance. They may also promote metastasis by circulating through the bloodstream. Thus, miRNAs in the bloodstream are promising biomarkers for the pre-disease state.

More here.

Aunt Rose

… the last
20 yrs
of her life
after her
. mother
died
she sat
at that
kitchen
table
hating
the irish

drinking
scotch
mist

&
clipping
obits

loneliness
spread out
in front
of her

like
family
jewels

&
now
years
later
i remember
i had no
kindness
for her

by Jim Bell
from Landing Amazed
Lily Pool Press, Northfield, Ma. 2010

Aamer Hussein in Dawn:

She was born in September 1916, she thought; history claims that she was born in Henan, China, in 1917, and named Zhou Kuanghu. Either way, Han Suyin would have been 100 this year. She died in 2012 and there were many obituaries that marked her passing, mostly remembering her role as a leading apologist for Mao Zedong’s regime. Her once-celebrated autobiographical and historical works, gradually sidelined in the two decades that followed the end of the Cultural Revolution, had been called unreadable and rudely forgotten in the new millennium.

The only one of her many works of fiction, history, and autobiography to be reprinted as a modern classic in English — ironically, in Singapore, where she was once persona non grata for her left-wing beliefs and her increasingly pro-China stance — is And the Rain My Drink, a novel about the guerrilla war in what was then called Malaya. Published in 1956 at the height of the events it depicted, it didn’t quite topple the British Empire, but certainly did serve as the proverbial thorn in the side of colonial officialdom.

Han arrived in Malaysia in 1952, already lauded as the author of A Many-Splendoured Thing, the bestselling autobiographical account of her time in Hong Kong just after WWII.

More here.

Kai Kupferschmidt in Science:

Edward Holmes does not like making predictions, but last year he hazarded a few. Again and again, people had asked Holmes, an expert on viral evolution at the University of Sydney, how he expected SARS-CoV-2 to change. In May 2020, 5 months into the pandemic, he started to include a slide with his best guesses in his talks. The virus would probably evolve to avoid at least some human immunity, he suggested. But it would likely make people less sick over time, he said, and there would be little change in its infectivity. In short, it sounded like evolution would not play a major role in the pandemic’s near future.

“A year on I’ve been proven pretty much wrong on all of it,” Holmes says.

Well, not all: SARS-CoV-2 did evolve to better avoid human antibodies. But it has also become a bit more virulent and a lot more infectious, causing more people to fall ill. That has had an enormous influence on the course of the pandemic.

More here.

Alexei Navalny in The Guardian:

Exactly one year ago, I did not die from poisoning by a chemical weapon, and it would seem that corruption played no small part in my survival. Having contaminated Russia’s state system, corruption has also contaminated the intelligence services. When a country’s senior management is preoccupied with protection rackets and extortion from businesses, the quality of covert operations inevitably suffers. A group of FSB agents applied the nerve agent to my underwear just as shoddily as they incompetently dogged my footsteps for three and a half years – in violation of all instructions from above – allowing civil investigating activists to expose them at every turn.

To be fair, a regime based on corruption can perform more elementary tasks to perfection. The judicial system – the first thing autocrats intent on robbing their nation take control of – functions perfectly on a quid pro quo basis. That is why, when I went back to Russia after medical treatment, I was taken straight from the plane to prison. There is not much to celebrate in that, but at least I now have time to read the memoirs of world leaders.

More here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ectWc_cU79c

Matthew Hutson in The New Yorker:

Deep learning, the artificial-intelligence technology that powers voice assistants, autonomous cars, and Go champions, relies on complicated “neural network” software arranged in layers. A deep-learning system can live on a single computer, but the biggest ones are spread over thousands of machines wired together into “clusters,” which sometimes live at large data centers, like those operated by Google. In a big cluster, as many as forty-eight pizza-box-size servers slide into a rack as tall as a person; these racks stand in rows, filling buildings the size of warehouses. The neural networks in such systems can tackle daunting problems, but they also face clear challenges. A network spread across a cluster is like a brain that’s been scattered around a room and wired together. Electrons move fast, but, even so, cross-chip communication is slow, and uses extravagant amounts of energy.

Eric Vishria, a general partner at Benchmark, a venture-capital firm in San Francisco, first came to understand this problem in the spring of 2016, while listening to a presentation from a new computer-chip company called Cerebras Systems. Benchmark is known for having made early investments in companies such as Twitter, Uber, and eBay—that is, in software, not hardware. The firm looks at about two hundred startup pitches a year, and invests in maybe one. “We’re in this kissing-a-thousand-frogs kind of game,” Vishria told me. As the presentation started, he had already decided to toss the frog back. “I’m, like, Why did I agree to this? We’re not gonna do a hardware investment,” he recalled thinking. “This is so dumb.”

More here.

Ruhullah Khapalwak in More Intelligent Life:

When the fighting got so near that the walls of his house shook, Abdul, a retired teacher in Kandahar, decided it was time to hide his books. Reading has been a respite for Abdul since the Taliban began their extraordinary advance on Kandahar, Afghanistan’s second city, a few months ago. Until recently, Kandahar hosted one of the largest American military bases in Afghanistan; Abdul fears that insurgents will take revenge now they are in control of the city. “I have not slept all night,” he says. “The government has failed our country.”

Abdul is part of a book club that allows people to swap titles with each other: Kandahar has no libraries. Self-help books, many of them by foreign authors, have helped him manage his anxiety. He also reads essays on politics and terrorism. But even such simple pleasures are now under threat. The author of one of his books about fundamentalism was assassinated in Kabul a few weeks ago. Abdul owns a collection by Kandahar’s most famous poet, Abdul Bari Jahani, who now lives in America. Last time the Taliban were in charge they banned his books.

More here.

My Grandfather’s Hat

—in memory of Basiliso Morot Cordero

I cannot stop thinking of that old hat
he is wearing in the grave: the last gift
of love from his wife before they fell
into the habit of silence.

Forgotten as the daughters chose
the funeral clothes, it sat
on his dresser as it always had:
old leather, aromatic as his individual self,
pliable as an old companion, ready to go
anywhere with him.

The youngest grandchild remembered
and ran after her father, who was carrying
the old man’s vanilla suit—the one worn to bodas,
bautismos, and elections—like a lifeless
child in arms: No te olvides
del sombrero de abuelo.

I had seen him hold the old hat in his lap
and caress it as he talked of the good times,
and when he walked outside, placed it on his head
like a blessing.

My grandfather, who believed in God,
the Gracious Host, Proprietor of the Largest Hacienda.
May it be so. May heaven
be an island in the sun,
where a good man may wear his hat with pride,
glad that he could take it with him.

by Judith Ortiz Cofer
from Paper Dance-55 Latino Poets
Persea Books, 1995

Edward Sorel at the New York Times:

In the rat-infested trenches of France, Raymond Chandler became an alcoholic, and stayed one. In 1932, after booze had gotten him fired from a cushy job, he resolved to cut down on the gin and become a novelist. He began by selling hard-boiled detective yarns to the pulpy magazine Black Mask, then later sold his first novel, “The Big Sleep,” to Alfred A. Knopf. In 1943, Chandler’s third novel, “The High Window,” was read by the Paramount director Billy Wilder. He liked the way Chandler wrote dialogue, and offered him a contract of $750 a week for 10 weeks to work with him on a screenplay for “Double Indemnity,” James M. Cain’s novel. Chandler had never written for the screen, and didn’t like the idea of being subservient to a young Austrian-born Jew who had written dozens of screenplays in Berlin and Hollywood. But Chandler was broke, and had a sick wife to care for. He signed up.

more here.