Lisa Siraganian at nonsite:

If Siri responded to your questions with QAnon conspiracy theories, would you want her answers to be legally protected? Would your verdict change if we labeled Siri’s answers either “computer generated” or “meaningful language?” Or as legal scholars Ronald Collins and David Skover ask in their recent monograph, Robotica: Speech Rights and Artificial Intelligence (2018), should the “constitutional conception of speech” be extended “to the semi-autonomous creation and delivery of robotic speech?”1 By “robotic speech,” they don’t mean some imagined language dreamed up in science fiction but the more ordinary phenomenon of “algorithmic output of computers”: the results of Google searches, instructions by GPS navigational devices, tweets by corporate bots, or responses by Amazon’s Alexa to a query about tomorrow’s weather. And by “the constitutional conception of speech” they are invoking the First Amendment’s fundamental prohibition declaring that “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.” Collins and Skover deliver their verdict: the U.S. Constitution should recognize and protect so-called “robotic expression,” the computer-generated language of your iPhone or like devices.

more here.

Kelefa Sanneh at The New Yorker:

Wilkes, who is thirty-one, grew up in Connecticut, and Gendel, who is thirty-five, grew up in central California. Both were drawn to Los Angeles by way of the jazz program at the University of Southern California. They turned out to have mixed feelings about studying jazz in a university setting. And maybe they had mixed feelings, too, about being tied to a tradition that arouses as much strong feeling—and, worse, as much weak feeling—as jazz does. As a boy, Wilkes was obsessed with the Grateful Dead and Phish, which gave him a love of improvisation. By the time he applied to U.S.C., he was a proficient electric-bass player, and, although he knew that the jazz program typically accepted only upright-bass players, he figured that the jazz bureaucracy might make an exception for him. It did not, and so he studied R. & B. and funk instead, working with a string of legendary musicians, including Patrice Rushen, an esteemed composer and keyboardist, and Leon (Ndugu) Chancler, a drum virtuoso. This was not a sad story: it turned out that Wilkes loved session playing, which demands precision and adaptability, and he had no complaints about his college experience. But, as Wilkes talked in the studio, Gendel grew outraged on his behalf—he couldn’t abide the idea that a jazz department would reject an eager student just because he played the wrong instrument. “It’s the most anti-jazz, anti-open-minded mentality I can imagine,” he said, becoming more animated than he’d been all afternoon. “This is why I’m against it all. It’s just stupid!”

more here.

Aarathi Prasad in The Guardian:

It was May 2020, just months after Sars-CoV-2 began ripping through the world, when it emerged that 97% of the British medical staff who had died of the disease were from communities categorised as black, Asian and minority ethnic. News reports pronounced it extraordinary, shocking. Would that staple of press briefing catchphrases – “the virus does not discriminate” – require reconsideration? Could the reason minorities were suffering more be because of some sort of genetic difference? By September, it was announced that heightened genetic risk was not responsible for these groups being up to three times more likely to die from the virus. Instead, researchers laid the blame squarely on environmental factors and healthcare disparities.

Less than a year later, there were reports that uptake rates for the Covid vaccination were lowest among ethnic minorities. Sage, the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies, warned that this could form a significant risk to the vaccine drive. Low uptake was also found to be rooted in social and political factors, from long years of structural and institutional racism and discrimination, and their impact on those who remain among the most deprived in modern Britain.

Black, Pakistani, Bangladeshi people, whose very presence in Britain is inextricable from our colonial past, still live in the most deprived areas, in crowded housing, in places with the worst air pollution, subject to a range of toxic conditions that have huge impacts on health outcomes.

More here.

Maddie Bender in Scientific American:

When Yas Crawford started feeling the effects of her chronic illness, she says she felt as if her body and mind were at war. “When you’re ill for a long time, your body takes over,” she says. “Your brain wants to do one thing, and your body does something else.”

Crawford has myalgic encephalomyelitis, also called chronic fatigue syndrome. She says her illness made her ruminate on interoception, the perception of the body’s internal state. People with this condition, particularly those who are afflicted for a long time, report heightened awareness of their body’s inner workings—such as their heartbeat and temperature.

We commonly think of five senses—sight, sound, smell, touch and taste—and we have the senses of balance and body position as well. But interoception could be called an “eighth sense,” argues Crawford, who has a background in geology and microbiology and a master’s degree in photography. That title inspired her to make an eponymous collection of artwork. Cognition IX, an image from that collection, recently won the 2021 Art of Neuroscience competition held by the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience.

More here.

Bedtime Stories (excerpt)

—after Marc Chagall

Already we know this story
is not real, the colors
are too vague. The child
closes his eyes and imagines
the rest of his life
like a dream about falling
from a great height.
But this is early on,
before sleeplessness, before
he comes to terms with the idea
of gravity and the window
shuts completely in his dreams.
He will lose track of the story.
He will stare at the ceiling.
He will learn to count sheep.
This is a prelude to something else,
something that comes much later,
not sleep, but a kind of falling
through layers of himself,
not at all like a rose
but a sheaf of numbers
adding up to one belief,
a feeling he can count on,
thee pure mathematics of desire.

It happens slowly . . .

by Silvia Curbelo
from Touching the Fire
Anchor Books 1998

I Do Not Believe

My beloved if
Death be here for you
Let it be in tuberculosis’ form
Or the form of bitter cold,
Not as prey of suicide bombing.

You should have the time
To review your memories,
To review the particulars of your body,
To make plans for your departure.
Not to depart the house on your feet
And we only find your shoes in the bazaar.
Not to ever find your hands or your smile.
Never to locate your eyes.

With my own eyes I ought to
Witness your death, your final breath.
My fingers should touch your eyelids to close.
Otherwise, no one will believe it, forever
I myself will not believe it.

***

by Elyas Alavi, translated by Fatemeh Shams and Leonard Schwartz, and more here.

Ed Simon in The Millions:

Somewhere along the crooked scar of the eastern front, during those acrid summer months of the Brusilov Offensive in 1916, when the Russian Empire pierced into the lines of the Central Powers and perhaps more than one million men would be killed from June to September, a howitzer commander stationed with the Austrian 7th Army would pen gnomic observations in a notebook, having written a year before that the “facts of the world are not the end of the matter.” Among the richest men in Europe, the 27-year-old had the option to defer military service, and yet an ascetic impulse compelled Ludwig Wittgenstein into the army, even though he lacked any patriotism for the Austro-Hungarian cause. Only five years before his trench ruminations would coalesce into 1921’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, and the idiosyncratic contours of Wittgenstein’s thinking were already obvious, scribbling away as incendiary explosions echoed across the Polish countryside and mustard gas wafted over fields of corpses. “When my conscience upsets my equilibrium, then I am not in agreement with something. But is this? Is it the world?” he writes. Wittgenstein is celebrated and detested for this aphoristic quality, with pronouncements offered as if directly from the Sibylline grove. “Philosophy,” Wittgenstein argued in the posthumously published Culture and Value, “ought really to be written only as poetic composition.” In keeping with its author’s sentiment, I’d claim that the Tractatus is less the greatest philosophical work of the 20th century than it is one of the most immaculate volumes of modernist poetry written in the past hundred years.

More here.

Aila Slisco in Newsweek:

Biotechnology company Moderna is preparing to begin human trials on HIV vaccines as early as Wednesday, using the same mRNA platform as the firm’s COVID-19 vaccine.

An entry posted Wednesday to the National Institutes of Health’s registry of clinical trials shows that the trials are estimated to start on August 19 and should be completed by spring 2023.

Moderna has two HIV vaccine candidates, mRNA-1644 and mRNA-1644v2-Core, both of which have cleared initial safety testing before being used on humans for the first time. The randomized trials will include 56 HIV-negative participants aged 18 to 56.

HIV is one of several viruses that Moderna is targeting for vaccine development using the mRNA platform. The Moderna and the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccines were the first-ever mRNA vaccines authorized for human use in the U.S., although the technology had been in development for decades and was reaching maturity as the pandemic emerged.

More here.

Sinan Antoon in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

AT THE CASABLANCA Book Fair in Morocco back in 2009, the Iraqi poet Saadi Youssef was signing the seventh volume of his Complete Poetic Works. A flock of junior high school girls in their blue uniforms were standing nearby. One of them pointed to her friend, telling Youssef: “She, too, is a poet.” He smiled and gestured to the young poet to come forward. She hesitated: “I’m just a beginner.” “I, too, am a beginner. We are all beginners,” said Youssef. The septuagenarian who uttered those words is widely recognized as one of the greatest modern Arab poets. When he uttered those words, he had been writing and publishing poetry for more than half a century. It was neither a hyperbolic statement, nor false modesty on his part. Well into his 80s, one of the most remarkable features of Youssef’s poetry (and his persona) was his restlessness. He was audacious (even reckless, at times) and on an incessant quest for new beginnings.

More here.

Marc Ribot in Literary Hub:

Hi. My name is Marc. I’m a guitarist who points extremely loud amplifiers directly at his head. Very often. Sometimes as often as 200 nights a year for the past 45 years. Audiologists say this could make one’s ears howl, create an uncomfortable sensation of density in one’s head, and eventually make it impossible to hear human conversation. Yet I persist . . . Why?

It’s true most amps sound better at volumes loud enough to fray the edge of notes with the subtle distortion that is to electric guitars what makeup is to a drag queen of a certain age. Not accidentally, as manufacturers in the late 50s and early 60s raced to design equipment with less and less distortion, guitarists turned up louder and louder to subvert their efforts. Nor are guitarists alone in this desire to strain.

We seem to love broken voices in general: vocal cords eroded by whiskey and screaming, the junked-out weakness of certain horn players, distortion which signifies surpassing the capabilities of a tube or a speaker—voices that distort, damage, but (at least in performance) don’t actually die. The singer pushes through the note, the horn player eventually finds breath, the amplifier struggles on but doesn’t explode and become silent.

More here.

Emmett FitzGerald in Orion Magazine:

LAST YEAR, I watched Orange Sky Day play out on Instagram from a lake on the other side of the country. In a deck chair I scrolled through countless images of the uncanny wildfire sky, with caption after caption reminding me that this dusky light was from the middle of the afternoon. My beleaguered San Francisco Bay Area friends, who had spent the better part of a month trapped inside due to smoke, ventured out of their apartments to document the otherworldliness. At first, I felt lucky not to be at my home in Berkeley. But that feeling was quickly replaced with survivor’s guilt, as I watched my friends suffer while I read a dystopian novel and drank a beer.

I almost didn’t make it to the East Coast last year because of the pandemic, but after a month spent reading articles on airplane ventilation, I decided it was worth the risk to see my family at least once in 2020. I traveled from San Francisco in one of the N95 masks left over from the previous year’s fires and quarantined for a week in my friends’ New York City apartment. Two COVID tests and a borrowed car later, I was hugging my mother in the driveway.

A few days into the visit, I went on a canoe trip with my dad. We paddled a circuit of ponds with quarter-mile carries between them. There have always been loons in the Adirondacks, but on that trip we saw more than I could ever remember. Sometimes it was just a pair, sometimes five to ten of them swimming together in little groups, or “rafts.” Later, Dad and I watched a bald eagle leap from the top of a white pine to snatch a perch from the lake. It rose from the water with the fish in its talons and flapped off toward the sun.

For a brief moment that day I forgot about everything. Not just the pandemic, but about all the other crises that kept me up at night—climate change and ecological collapse. I let my brain overinterpret the loons and eagles as signs not only that these lakes were healthy, but that the whole planet was thriving. The birds were abundant, the air was clear, and for a brief moment, I felt profoundly calm.

More here.

George Packer in The Atlantic:

In the past few weeks, the Biden administration’s domestic agenda has come into sharp focus: a bipartisan Senate bill for physical and environmental infrastructure projects nearing passage; new statistics showing that COVID-19 relief has dramatically reduced poverty across demographic groups; an executive order aimed at concentrated market power, promoting competition and worker power; a $3.5 trillion budget proposal with large outlays in social spending, paid for by taxes on the rich and corporations; presidential speeches on behalf of better jobs for Americans at the bottom and middle of the economy. The sum of these and other policies is more ambitious, and more ideologically pointed, than the Biden campaign slogan “Build Back Better.” President Biden is using the resources of the federal government to reverse nearly half a century of growing monopoly, plutocracy, and inequality. Regardless of whether this agenda goes far enough, or whether Congress allows it to go anywhere at all, the administration is pointing the country in a fundamentally new direction.

Biden hasn’t given this new direction a name. His mind goes to the particular, not the general. He speaks in sayings, anecdotes, and exhortations. He provides reassurance, not inspiration. But successful presidents from Lincoln to Roosevelt to Reagan understood that the people need a vision. If Biden won’t give his a name, I’ll try.

In “The Four Americas,” an article adapted from my book Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal, I described the four dominant narratives in this country over the past half century: Free America, Smart America, Real America, and Just America.

More here.

When the World as We Knew It Ended

We were dreaming on an occupied island at the farthest edge
of a trembling nation when it went down.

Two towers rose up from the east island of commerce and touched
the sky. Men walked on the moon. Oil was sucked dry
by two brothers. Then it went down. Swallowed
by a fire dragon, by oil and fear.
Eaten whole.

It was coming.

We had been watching since the eve of the missionaries in their
long and solemn clothes, to see what would happen.

We saw it
from the kitchen window over the sink
as we made coffee, cooked rice and
potatoes, enough for an army.

We saw it all, as we changed diapers and fed
the babies. We saw it,
through the branches
of the knowledgeable tree
through the snags of stars, through
the sun and storms from our knees
as we bathed and washed
the floors.

The conference of the birds warned us, as they flew over
destroyers in the harbor, parked there since the first takeover.
It was by their song and talk we knew when to rise
when to look out the window
to the commotion going on—
the magnetic field thrown off by grief.

Read more »

Arjun Jayadev and J.W. Mason in Boston Review:

In 1919 John Maynard Keynes, like many Europeans, looked back at the prewar era of free trade as a kind of golden age. “The inhabitant of London,” he recalled,

could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep; he could at the same moment and by the same means adventure his wealth in the natural resources and new enterprises of any quarter of the world and share, without exertion or even trouble, in their prospective fruits and advantages.

In the wreckage of World War I, it was hard to imagine a return to this borderless “economic Eldorado.” But today, it’s the relatively self-contained national economies of the mid-twentieth century that may seem like a lost world. To access the products of the whole earth, you don’t even have to pick up the phone; you can just log onto Amazon.

This return to—and surpassing of—prewar levels of economic integration has been paralleled by a revival of pre-Keynesian ideas about the international economy. The vast expansion of international trade over the past forty years is often presented as the result of simply removing artificial constraints—that is, as a victory of “free trade” over “protectionism,” a realization of the cosmopolitan and liberal ideals of the nineteenth century after the aberrant nationalism and state direction of the economy of the twentieth. This victory is often claimed as one of the great successes of the neoliberal era, one whose benefits are so obvious as to hardly need stating. One of us recently attended a panel on trade at a meeting of the American Economic Association, where the chair opened the discussion by saying, “Obviously, if you are in this room then you are for free trade, as much as we can get.” No one in the room seemed to disagree.

More here.

Virginia Jackson on the late Lauren Berlant, over at Critical Inquiry:

I. The Function of Criticism

In 2015, before she got sick and after they turned down an offer from my university, I wrote an essay about Lauren’s work and what it meant to me.

That essay was a poor rehearsal for an elegy, since all I was mourning then was the chance to have them as a colleague, the missed opportunity to have her close.  I never imagined a world without her; instead, I selfishly and grandiosely thought that we could create a world together, and then I missed that fantasy world when it did not happen (they would have had a lot to say about that).  I see now (as I think she saw then) that world would have been impossible, but that’s the kind of thing Lauren made you believe: that the sum of [nothing is impossible] + [everything is impossible] = {some things must actually be possible}.  And they made you think that work—academic work!– could be a form of personally motivated communal expression, maybe even a way of making wishes come true.  I needed that reassurance at the time (I still do), and maybe it is also reassuring to confess that Lauren answered that need, though honestly, I am embarrassed to write about my deep affection for and attachment to Lauren in Critical Inquiry, since such public testimony translates so immediately into cultural capital, given who Lauren was and will continue to become.   They would have pointed that out, too.  In fact, they would have said that may be all criticism ever is.  Like that precarious sequence and like the pronouns in those sentences, my feelings then as now were and are a muddle of the personal and the professional:  as everybody can’t seem to stop saying these days, in recent years, Lauren used “she” for personal stuff and “they” for professional stuff, but the problem with this separation is that she was terrible at telling the personal from the public, the personal from the professional, the personal from the academic, the personal from, well, anything.  Whatever they did, there she was.  Now that they are gone, and she is, too, I see that what I wrote six years ago didn’t even come close to measuring our loss.

Lauren was a public figure, so of course they had a mediated life that was very different than her life with her cats and Ian.  That’s not what I’m saying.  I was not one of her best friends, though I loved her dearly, but probably like a lot of people, what I loved most was their work.

More here.