Justin E. H. Smith in Berfrois:

On the evening of December 2, 2020, around 10pm, I swallowed the last of what must have been multiple lifetimes’ worth of mouthsful of red wine. Unlike the partisans of AA, I am confident in saying that I will never again in my life consume alcohol. There are things I just don’t do anymore. I am no less morally certain, for example, that I will never go sky-diving. The version of me that believed a good life is constituted from such “fun” diversions as this died a long time ago. Far from having a “bucket list”, I now understand that the proper conduct of the second half of life is to approach something like what the Tibetan Buddhists call tukdam, to do less and less, but only to sit and meditate, and to breathe once every century or so, so that by the time you actually die there will be scarcely any change to register. I can picture a future not so far from now when, to the question, “Is he alive or dead?”, the only fitting response will be: “Who can say?” You might be able to jolt me into some new movement, like a fly removed from its long sleep in a jar of talc that flicks its wing in reluctant palingenesis (the phenomenon of being “born again”, which by the law of nomen est omen has long tricked me into thinking that Sarah Palin must be destined for a comeback); then again you might not. So, yeah, sky-diving’s out, along with drinking. The version of me that drank died two years ago. We’re coming up on the two-year anniversary of his death.

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Sam Russell in The Independent:

A grammatical problem which has perplexed scholars since the 5th century BC has been solved by a Cambridge University student and could “revolutionise the study of Sanskrit”, a professor has said.

Indian PhD student Rishi Rajpopat, 27, decoded a rule taught by Panini, a master of the ancient Sanskrit language who lived around two-and-a-half-thousand years ago.

Sanskrit is only spoken in India by an estimated 25,000 people out of a population of more than one billion, Cambridge University said.

But it is the sacred language of Hinduism and the medium through which much of India’s greatest science, philosophy, poetry and other secular literature have been communicated for centuries.

More here.

Timothy Garton Ash in The Guardian:

Wherever I turned, in every conversation, there was a total rejection not just of the Russian dictator, not merely of the Russian Federation as a state, but of everything and almost everyone Russian. Polling by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology shows that some 80% of Ukrainians had a positive attitude to Russia in 2013; by May 2022, the figure was just 2%. A university lecturer told me that his students now write “russia” with a small initial letter. “I don’t correct them.”

This may be unsurprising in Ukraine, a country suffering from a Russian war that is now primarily directed against the civilian population. But the same thing is happening across much of the territory of the former Russian (and subsequently Soviet) empire – which, since the early 2000s, Moscow has tried to reimagine as the russkiy mir, or Russian world.

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Paul Pettitt in Sapiens:

The recent study’s analysis of zinc from the tooth enamel of a Neanderthal who lived and died around 150,000 years ago in the Spanish Pyrenees gives new insights into the diet of ancient humans. Zinc isotopes were analyzed from 43 teeth of 12 animal species living in a grassland around the Los Moros I Cave in Catalonia, Spain. These included carnivores such as wolf, hyena, and dhole (also known as mountain wolf); omnivorous cave bears; and herbivores including ibex, red deer, horse, and rabbit. The results brought to life a food web of the Pleistocene steppe, a system of interlocking food chains from plants up to the top carnivores. The zinc in the Neanderthal’s tooth had by far the lowest zinc value in the food web, revealing they were a top-level carnivore.

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Stephen Witt in The New Yorker:

In the outskirts of Santa Barbara, California, between the orchards and the ocean, sits an inconspicuous warehouse, its windows tinted brown and its exterior painted a dull gray. The facility has almost no signage, and its name doesn’t appear on Google Maps. A small label on the door reads “Google AI Quantum.” Inside, the computer is being reinvented from scratch.

In September, Hartmut Neven, the founder of the lab, gave me a tour. Neven, originally from Germany, is a bald fifty-seven-year-old who belongs to the modern cast of hybridized executive-mystics. He talked of our quantum future with a blend of scientific precision and psychedelic glee. He wore a leather jacket, a loose-fitting linen shirt festooned with buttons, a pair of jeans with zippered pockets on the legs, and Velcro sneakers that looked like moon boots. “As my team knows, I never miss a single Burning Man,” he told me.

In the middle of the warehouse floor, an apparatus the size and shape of a ballroom chandelier dangled from metal scaffolding. Bundles of cable snaked down from the top through a series of gold-plated disks to a processor below. The processor, named Sycamore, is a small, rectangular tile, studded with several dozen ports. Sycamore harnesses some of the weirdest properties of physics in order to perform mathematical operations that contravene all human intuition. Once it is connected, the entire unit is placed inside a cylindrical freezer and cooled for more than a day. The processor relies on superconductivity, meaning that, at ultracold temperatures, its resistance to electricity all but disappears. When the temperature surrounding the processor is colder than the deepest void of outer space, the computations can begin.

More here.

Vivian Lam in LA Review of Books:

WHEN SUPERGIANT officially released Hades in September 2020, the state of the world wasn’t very far from the literal burning hellscape of the game. Zagreus, the discontented prince of the Underworld, seeks to run away from a home where he’s never felt he belonged — a quest that quickly proves futile, as he is killed over and over again and forced to restart where he began. In many respects, it’s no surprise that a game about repeatedly attempting to escape from a violent, labyrinthine hell from which there is no escape (as one fan noted) continues to strike a chord for many.

But the appeal of Hades lies less in its offer of escapist fantasy than in the way it forces players to confront everything they seek to escape in endless, recursive loops. And it is in the very act of repeated confrontation, the game argues, that survival in the absence of escape becomes possible.

In his Theory of the Novel, literary critic György Lukács attributes the genesis of the novel to the loss of the closed totality of the Homeric epic. He describes antiquity as an era where objective reality could be portrayed “as it is” because there was no disconnect between the self and the world. Divinity had left its fingerprints on every part of materiality, and total understanding of this immanence wasn’t necessary — just full acceptance.

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Philip Andrews-Speed in Green:

China accounts for nearly 30% of the world’s carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions from energy. The absolute quantity of emissions continued to rise at 2-3% per year during the decade to 2019, and is estimated to have grown by 0.8% during the Covid-19 pandemic year of 2020. This continuing increase of CO₂ emissions is caused by the ongoing growth of the economy which in turn has been driving annual energy consumption rises of more than 4%. Fossil fuels are still dominant. In 2019, they provided for 85% of the primary energy supply, with coal accounting for 57%. Coal consumption did decline between 2013 and 2016, but it then rose a total of 3% between 2016 and 2019. Energy consumption continued to rise during the 2020 pandemic, with that for coal increasing by an estimated 0.6%. Demand for coal is likely to rise sharply in 2021 as the economy continues to rebound from the pandemic. Consumption of both oil and natural gas continued to increase in 2020 and demand for both fuels is set to accelerate in 2021.

This, then, is the background against which China’s government will be drawing up their short- and medium-term plans for achieving President Xi Jinping’s pledge reach peak CO₂ emissions before 2030 and to strive for carbon neutrality by 2060. A drastic reduction of CO₂ emissions from the energy sector will be the most essential element, but not the only one. Other sources of emissions such as agriculture are also relevant, as are carbon sinks.

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Thomas B. Edsall Talks to Adam Shatz over at the LRB podcast (photo Hannah Beier/Alamy):

Thomas B. Edsall, a columnist for the New York Times, talks to Adam Shatz about the landscape of US politics following the recent elections. They consider some of the historic causes for the apparent polarisation of today’s electorate, and look ahead to the vote in 2024. Will Biden be a credible candidate for re-election? And what would a Trump or DeSantis (or even a Youngkin) candidacy mean for both the Republican and Democratic parties?

More here.

Geoff Dyer at The Guardian:

“The past is a foreign country” has finally become part of my present. I’ve just read LP Hartley’s 1953 novel The Go-Between for the first time, a book everyone else my age read at least 45 years ago. I’d seen the film and that seemed to be enough. And then, a few weeks ago, I came across a seductive Penguin edition in a secondhand bookshop in Edinburgh and became curious to find out what I’d been missing.

A book about a boy becoming initiated into the mysteries of adult life (sex and its frequent thematic partner, betrayal), it is itself the kind of novel that introduces youngish readers into the mysteries and subtleties of fiction. Reading the novel is part of the process of learning how to read novels. But there was something appropriate, also, about the long delay in my getting round to it. I was reading The Go‑Between at the same age as the “60-odd” narrator when he looks back at the momentous summer of 1900. As a result, my experience of the book became inflected with the reading that had come between the age when I might or should have read it and the advanced age when I eventually did.

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James Wood at The New Yorker:

There have always been two dominant styles in Cormac McCarthy’s prose—roughly, afflatus and deflatus, with not enough breathable oxygen between them. McCarthy in afflatus mode is magnificent, vatic, wasteful, hammy. The words stagger around their meanings, intoxicated by the grandiloquence of their gesturing: “God’s own mudlark trudging cloaked and muttering the barren selvage of some nameless desolation where the cold sidereal sea breaks and seethes and the storms howl in from out of that black and heaving alcahest.” McCarthy’s deflatus mode is a rival rhetoric of mute exhaustion, as if all words, hungover from the intoxication, can hold on only to habit and familiar things: “He made himself a sandwich and spread some mustard over it and he poured a glass of milk.” “He put his toothbrush back in his shavingkit and got a towel out of his bag and went down to the bathroom and showered in one of the steel stalls and shaved and brushed his teeth and came back and put on a fresh shirt.”

McCarthy’s novel “The Road” (2006) can be seen as both the fulfillment and the transformation of this profligately gifted stylist, because in it the two styles justified themselves and came together to make a third style, of punishing and limpid beauty.

more here.

Glenn Kessler in The Washington Post:

It’s time for our roundup of the biggest Pinocchios of the year.

Sen.-elect J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) made a startlingly false claim shortly after he won the GOP nomination — that Biden was intentionally allowing drugs such as fentanyl to flood the United States with the goal of killing Trump supporters in the “heartland” of the country. But this hyperbolic claim was based on zero facts. Fentanyl seizures have increased, not fallen, under Biden. Overdose deaths jumped sharply under Trump. As for Trump voters being supposedly targeted, people of color die at a higher rate from opioids than Whites.

More here.

Listening to the Harvest

Harvest sounds hearty, sounds sure of itself — sounds like
the record, sounds like “Heart of Gold,” but even then, Neil
sings that it’s the searching for the heart of gold, and the
more I harvest the more I realize I am searching, it is work: it is
being harvested by insects, poked by thorny leaves,
discerning the green of a bean from the green of a leaf,
determining the shine on the skin of a jeweled eggplant—
it’s finding everything in its exact time, plucking it from this
into that; playing god, obeying God; in service of the harvest,
on my knees, leaning into the garden, really prostrate before
the growth, in adoration of the land — I learn to reap
without violence; listen without taking; I yield in more and
more colors. Eat with the salt of each season.

by Lauren Turner
from The Ecotheo Review

Reading Here

Dwight Garner in The New York Times:

It used to be that, when you died, what you wanted was an obituary in a good newspaper, not that you’d be around to savor it. Since the introduction of the smartphone, the stakes have been raised. “I got a breaking news alert when I croaked,” some overachiever has surely bragged in the great beyond. “How about you?”

Obituaries in newspapers like this one have loosened up in the past few decades. Résumé virtues, like being the inventor of Velcro, still matter most, but eulogy virtues, like being able to mimic an old school bus starting up, are increasingly sneaking in as well. One newspaper led this shift in tone: The Daily Telegraph in London. It was The Telegraph’s inspiration, beginning in the 1980s, to treat obituaries as an essentially comic form. The paper’s cheeky, truth-dealing obits have inspired a cult readership. The books that collect them, with titles devoted to “Rogues,” “Heroes and Adventurers,” “Naval Obituaries,” “Sports” and so on, are oddly uplifting, better than edibles, to tuck into before bed.

The latest Telegraph collection is titled “Eccentric Lives.” It’s a book about oddballs and joy-hogs and the especially drunken and/or irascible, and it may be the best yet. The English journalist Jessica Mitford, in her letters, said that the slogan for her funeral would be “brevity followed by levity.” The Telegraph seems to abide by similar rules.

More here.

Terence Trouillot at Frieze:

Gilliam’s story is the all-too-familiar one of a Black artist only receiving critical acclaim and attention much later in his career. Although many were aware of his genius well before he came into the limelight, he simply was not given his due as one of the best abstractionists of his generation. I fell in love with his work early on, like many of us, through research and books. His drapery paintings – massive sculptural canvases, stained with whisps of colour and hung in various clumps sans stretcher – singlehandedly revitalized my passion for the medium. He was an expert colourist and a brilliant manipulator of materials. In so many ways, he taught me through his work what it meant to be a true master painter. Recently, I was lucky enough to see two great, posthumous shows of Gilliam’s work: ‘White and Black Paintings: 1975–77’ at David Kordansky in Los Angeles and ‘Late Paintings’ at Pace London. These two exhibitions served as effective bookends to Gilliam’s illustrious career. Many of the works in both shows looked simultaneously contemporary and historical: in the 1960s and ’70s, he experimented with bevelling his canvases, a technique he would return to much later.

more here.

Lindsey Carman Williams at the LARB:

Ghost stories continue to be one of the most popular types of short stories, especially since the subgenre first appeared in early gothic novels such as Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (i.e., the ghost story of the Bleeding Nun) and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. I became enthralled with ghost stories after I read Rhoda Broughton’s Twilight Stories (1873) a few years ago. In particular, Broughton’s “Behold, It Was a Dream!” feels quite modern in its depiction of xenophobia, especially with the story being written over 100 years ago. Ever since reading this collection, I’ve been an avid ghost story collector, and, needless to say, I was eager to get my hands on not just one but two new collections of supernatural tales and ghost stories: Even in the Grave and Other Terrors: An Inclusive Anthology. Published in July 2022, both anthologies illustrate that the ghost story is alive and well despite being a classic genre.

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Sigal Samuel in Vox:

In Ghana, a nation of 32 million people, there are only 62 psychiatrists.

Zimbabwe, with a population of 15 million, has only 19 psychiatrists.

And in Uganda, there are 47 psychiatrists serving a country of 48 million — less than one single psychiatrist for every million people.

These are staggering ratios. To get your head around them, take the US as a comparison. There are around 45,000 psychiatrists for all 333 million Americans, which translates to about 135 psychiatrists for every million people. That’s still not enough — experts are actually warning of an escalating shortage — and yet it’s a whopping 135 times more coverage than exists in Uganda. These numbers have very real, and sometimes very brutal, implications for people’s lives. When psychiatry and other forms of professional mental health care are not accessible, people suffer in silence or turn to whatever options they can find. In Ghana, for instance, thousands of desperate families bring their ailing loved ones to “prayer camps” in hopes of healing, only to find that the self-styled prophets there chain their loved ones to trees. Instead of receiving medical treatment for, say, schizophrenia, the patients receive prayers.

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Heidi Ledford in Nature:

Elaborately engineered immune cells can not only recognize cancer cells, but also evade defences that tumours use to fend off attacks, researchers have found. Two studies published today in Science^1,2 build on the success of chimeric antigen receptor (CAR)-T cancer therapies, which use genetically altered T cells to seek out tumours and mark them for destruction. These treatments have the potential to lead to long-lasting remission, but are not successful for everyone, and have so far been effective against only a small number of cancers.

To bolster the power of CAR-T therapies, researchers have further engineered the cells to contain switches that allow control over when and where the cells are active. The hacked cells produce a protein that stimulates T cells, to counteract immunosuppressive signals that are often released by tumours. Both studies are a tour de force in T-cell engineering and highlight the direction that researchers want to push CAR-T-cell therapy, says systems immunologist Grégoire Altan-Bonnet at the US National Cancer Institute. “We know a lot of the parts, now it’s being able to put them together and explore,” he says. “If we engineer the system well, we can really put the tumours into checkmate.”

More here.

Erik Hoel in The Intrinsic Perspective:

Despite being the culmination of a century-long dream, no better word describes the much-discussed output of OpenAI’s ChatGPT than the colloquial “mid.”

I understand that this may be seen as downplaying its achievement. As those who’ve been paying attention to this space can attest, ChatGPT is by far the most impressive AI the public has had access to. It can basically pass the Turing test—conversationally, it acts much like a human. These new changes are from it having been given a lot of feedback and tutoring by humans themselves. ChatGPT was created by taking the original GPT-3 model and fine-tuning it on human ratings of its responses, e.g., OpenAI had humans interact with GPT-3, its base model, then rate how satisfied they were with the answer. ChatGPT’s connections were then shifted to give more weight to the ones that were important for producing human-pleasing answers.

Therefore, before we can discuss why ChatGPT is actually unimpressive, first we must admit that ChatGPT is impressive.

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