Hannah Thomasy in The New York Times:

Ned and Sunny stretch out together on the warm sand. He rests his head on her back, and every so often he might give her an affectionate nudge with his nose. The pair is quiet and, like many long-term couples, they seem perfectly content just to be in each other’s presence.

The couple are monogamous, which is quite rare in the animal kingdom. But Sunny and Ned are a bit scalier that your typical lifelong mates — they are shingleback lizards that live at Melbourne Museum in Australia. In the wild, shinglebacks regularly form long-term bonds, returning to the same partner during mating season year after year. One lizard couple in a long-term study had been pairing up for 27 years and were still going strong when the study ended. In this way, the reptiles are more like some of the animal kingdom’s most famous long-term couplers, such as albatrosses, prairie voles and owl monkeys, and they confound expectations many people have about the personalities of lizards. “There’s more socially going on with reptiles than we give them credit for,” said Sean Doody, a conservation biologist at the University of South Florida.

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Jess Cotton in Jacobin:

Annie Ernaux, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature last Thursday, was not on the other end of the telephone when the committee rang to deliver the news. Last year, she received a prank text telling her she had won the illustrious award, which might be one reason why her first response when the committee did get through to her was incredulous: “Are you sure?”

Unlike Philip Roth who sat on tenterhooks waiting for a call that never came, Ernaux, at eighty-two, was never too fussed about prizes. Certainly she didn’t wait in expectation of them. When she didn’t win the Man Booker International in 2019, she went to see the Dorothea Tanning show at the Tate Modern instead, had lunch with the view of Saint Paul’s Cathedral, and drank in a pub frequented by Amy Winehouse. She preferred her own company to the heavy, uncharming world of prize culture. On receipt of the Nobel, Ernaux, however, recognized the responsibility that came with it: to continue fighting “everything that is a form of injustice against women.”

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Benj Edwards in Ars Technica:

Matrix multiplication, which involves multiplying two rectangular arrays of numbers, is often found at the heart of speech recognition, image recognition, smartphone image processing, compression, and generating computer graphics. Graphics processing units (GPUs) are particularly good at performing matrix multiplication due to their massively parallel nature. They can dice a big matrix math problem into many pieces and attack parts of it simultaneously with a special algorithm.

In 1969, a German mathematician named Volker Strassen discovered the previous-best algorithm for multiplying 4×4 matrices, which reduces the number of steps necessary to perform a matrix calculation. For example, multiplying two 4×4 matrices together using a traditional schoolroom method would take 64 multiplications, while Strassen’s algorithm can perform the same feat in 49 multiplications.

Using a neural network called AlphaTensor, DeepMind discovered a way to reduce that count to 47 multiplications, and its researchers published a paper about the achievement in Nature last week.

More here.

Noam Chomsky and David Barsamian in the Boston Review:

David Barsamian: The situation in Ukraine is dire. If Putin is trapped in a corner, he may make a desperate move to use nuclear weapons, or one of the six Ukrainian nuclear reactors could be bombed (deliberately or by accident). The fate of the planet is in the hands of Putin, Zelensky, Biden. Frankly, I’m very worried. What can people do in this scenario?

Noam Chomsky: Same as always. It’s a dangerous scenario. We can work to try to influence what’s within our range of influence. The United States happens to be diverging right now, pretty sharply, from most of the world with regard to this crucial issue, and we can work to try to change that policy. That’s hard but not impossible. Most of the world overwhelmingly wants to move directly to negotiations to try to end the horrors in Ukraine before they get even worse. It’s true of the Global South, India, Indonesia, China, Africa, overwhelmingly. In Germany, according to a poll at the end of August, over three-quarters of the population want to move to negotiations right away. So that’s one point of view.

The United States and Britain are standing out. Their position is that the war must continue in order to severely weaken Russia, and that means no negotiations, of course.

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Robert Bryce in Quillette:

Last year, according to data from the BP Statistical Review of World Energy, in both the US, and the world as a whole, the growth in hydrocarbons—oil, natural gas, and coal—far exceeded the growth of wind and solar by huge margins.

Renewable energy’s inability to displace hydrocarbons isn’t due to a lack of money. According to Statista, between 2004 and 2019, spending on renewables in the US was some $577 billion. Meanwhile, over that same time frame, the rest of the world spent another $1.5 trillion on renewables. But the BP numbers show that despite all that spending, wind and solar are not making a significant dent in our insatiable thirst for oil, gas, and coal. The reasons for that are many, including the gargantuan scale of global energy use, and the limits on the availability of neodymium, steel, aluminum, copper, and myriad other commodities that will be needed by the gigaton to make any large-scale move away from hydrocarbons.

More here.

Jennifer Schuessler in The New York Times:

For nearly 150 years, a cloud has hung over the reputation of Geoffrey Chaucer, the author of “The Canterbury Tales,” long seen as the founder of the English literary canon.

A court document discovered in 1873 suggested that around 1380, Chaucer had been charged with raping Cecily Chaumpaigne, the daughter of a London baker. In the document, Chaumpaigne released Chaucer from “all manner of actions related to my raptus”— a word commonly translated as rape or abduction. In recent decades, the suggestion that Chaucer had been accused of rape helped inspire a rich vein of feminist criticism looking at sex, power and consent in stories like “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” and “The Miller’s Tale,” which contain depictions of sexual assault (or what to modern readers appears like it). But this week, two scholars stunned the world of Chaucer studies with previously unknown documents that they say show that the “raptus” document was not in fact related to an accusation of rape against Chaucer at all.

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Siddhartha Mukherjee in The Guardian:

In the spring of 2017, I was overwhelmed by the most profound wave of depression that I have ever experienced. I use the word “wave” deliberately: when it finally burst on me, having crept up slowly for months, I felt as if I were drowning in a tide of sadness I could not swim past or through. Superficially, my life seemed perfectly in control – but inside, I felt drenched in grief. There were days when getting out of bed, or even retrieving the newspaper outside the door, seemed unfathomably difficult. Simple moments of pleasure – my child’s funny drawing of a weeping shark (“Do the tears go up like bubbles, or just mingle into the saltwater?”) – seemed locked away in boxes, with all their keys thrown into the depths of the ocean.

Why? I could not tell. Part of it, perhaps, was coming to terms with my father’s death a year before. In the wake of his passing, I had thrown myself manically back to work, neglecting to give myself time and space to grieve. Some of it was confronting the inevitability of ageing. I was at the edge of the last years of my 40s, staring into what seemed like an abyss. My knees hurt and creaked when I ran. An abdominal hernia appeared out of nowhere. The poems I could recite from memory? I would now have to search my brain for words that had gone missing (“I heard a Fly buzz – when I died – / The Stillness in the Room / Was like” … um … like what?). I was becoming fragmented. It wasn’t my skin that had begun to sag, but my brain. I heard a fly buzz.

Things got worse. I dealt with it by ignoring it, until it had crested fully. I was like the proverbial frog in the pot that doesn’t sense the incremental rise in temperature until the water starts boiling. I started antidepressants (which helped, but only moderately) and began to see a psychiatrist (which helped much more). But the sudden wave of the disorder, and its recalcitrance, mystified me. I was lost. All I could feel was the “dank joylessness” the writer William Styron describes in Darkness Visible.

More here.

I Have Walked Along Many Roads

… I have walked along many roads,
and opened paths through brush,
I have sailed over a hundred seas
and tied up on a hundred shores.

… Everywhere  I’ve gone I’ve seen
excursions of sadness,
angry and melancholy
drunkards with black shadows,

… and academics in offstage clothes
who watch, say nothing, and think
they know, because they do not drink wine
in ordinary bars.

… Evil men who walk around
polluting the earth . . .

… And everywhere I’ve been I’ve seen
men who dance and play,
when they can, and work
the few inches of ground they have.

… If they turn up somewhere,
they never ask where they are.
When they take trips, they ride
on the back of old mules.

… They don’t know how to hurry,
not even on holidays.
They drink wine, if there is some,
if not, cool water.

… These men are the good ones,
who love, work, walk and dream.
And on a day no different than the rest
they lie down beneath the earth.

by Antonio Machado
from Times Alone
Wesleyan University Press, 1983
translated by Robert Bly

Kate Aronoff in The New Republic (Image: Ahmed Shurau/ Getty Images):

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Ivan Krastev and Leonard Benardo in Project Syndicate:

Though it has dragged on for three-quarters of a century, the metaphysics of Israel’s role in the international relations and the centrality of Israel-Palestine conflict in global politics continue to befuddle onlookers. How could this speck of land inspire such emotional intensity and command such outsize influence over US foreign policy?

The Arc of a Covenant, Walter Russell Mead, a celebrated American diplomatic historian who has written widely on foreign policy in the idiom of grand strategy, uses this lacuna as his point of departure. The result of a decade-long project to reinterpret Jewish and Israeli history in the United States, the book offers a broad-tent analysis that smashes cherished conceits and challenges long-held assumptions. Rather than placing all the customary figures at the head of the table, Mead rearranges the chairs to give us a glimpse of something new.

In an earlier book, Special Providence, he established himself as the rarest kind of foreign-policy thinker, playing the part of the responsible iconoclast who seeks to educate Americans about the deeper roots of their foreign policy. There, Mead described four foreign-policy traditions that have at times defined America’s national interest: the Wilsonian, which seeks a world safe for democracy; the Hamiltonian, which prioritizes America’s economic interests; the Jeffersonian, which aims to protect America from the corrupting influences of the outside world; and the Jacksonian, which envisions an America so powerful that it can avoid foreign entanglements and focus on the home front.

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Tobias Hübinette in Boston Review:

In the September 11 Swedish parliamentary election, the far-right Sweden Democrats party sent shockwaves through the country and the world by receiving over 20 percent of the votes, becoming the country’s second-biggest party. The historic election resulted in the resignation of the Social Democratic government, ending its eight-year rule, and the appointment of a right-wing government led by the Moderate Party’s Ulf Kristersson as prime minister. This deepens Europe’s rightward slide, and enshrines a radical right-wing politics in a country that has long been admired for its progressive politics and strong social safety net.

The Sweden Democrats have a direct organizational lineage tracing back to World War II–era Nazism. After the war, militant fascists kept organizing on the fringes of Swedish politics in organizations such as the Nordic Realm Party, founded in 1956, and Keep Sweden Swedish, founded in 1979. In 1988 leading figures from these groups came together to form the Sweden Democrats. During the party’s most radical years, in the 1990s, it led by convicted former Nazi activist Anders Klarström and was infamous for skinhead street violence. Just ahead of the recent election, the party published a white paper establishing that one of its founders had been a Waffen-SS volunteer during World War II. This is the context in which the current party leader Jimmie Åkesson, along with much of the party leadership, joined the Sweden Democrats in the mid-1990s. In a very superficial sense, the Sweden Democrats have sought to distance themselves from their Nazi roots, and in this round of elections called themselves simply a socially conservative party with nationalist values. On the surface, then, the party is actually less radical than, for example, Alternative for Germany or the French National Rally. It has even, for now, set aside its Swexit demands, anti-NATO stance, and pro-Russian leanings. Nevertheless, the party’s raison d’être remains intact: to recreate the demographic homogeneity of Sweden by any means necessary.

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Kate Mackenzie and Tim Sahay on the Jain Family Institute’s new project:

What crisis?

A year ago, one might be forgiven for thinking there was a moment of relative calm for wealthy countries: a year of vaccinations had made the pandemic less acute, inflation hadn’t yet provoked interest rate hikes, and labor markets were strong. In the climate world, the energy transition was progressing and, after years of struggle in the UN climate diplomacy track, there was even some sign from rich countries that the poorest and most vulnerable states might be compensated for the loss and damage from climate-fueled disasters.

In reality, all was not well. As anticipated early in the pandemic, dozens of low-income and smaller middle-income countries were continuing to grind towards sovereign debt crises provoked by a sudden drop in foreign income and climbing healthcare costs. Creditors (the wealthy Paris Club countries, multilateral banks, bondholders, and China) had all failed to head off this debt crisis. Meanwhile, vaccines remained unavailable to many people in the poorest countries. Energy costs were climbing.

Then Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and historic coordinated economic sanctions by Western governments, made everything much worse—in ways that even the world’s richest countries couldn’t avoid.

Energy costs in Europe were already high going into the winter of 2021. This was driven in part by the curtailment of China’s coal-fired generation leading to more demand for imported gas. In 2022, it’s spilled over into other countries: Europe and richer east Asia countries are now in a bidding war for limited gas supplies. Others have been priced out of the market entirely.

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Grace van Deelen in The Scientist:

For the first time, scientists report they have devised a method that uses functional magnetic resonance imaging brain recordings to reconstruct continuous language. The findings are the next step in the quest for better brain-computer interfaces, which are being developed as an assistive technology for those who can’t speak or type. In a preprint posted September 29 on bioRxiv, a team at the University of Texas at Austin details a “decoder,” or algorithm, that can “read” the words that a person is hearing or thinking during a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) brain scan. While other teams had previously reported some success in reconstructing language or images based on signals from implants in the brain, the new decoder is the first to use a noninvasive method to accomplish this.

“If you had asked any cognitive neuroscientist in the world twenty years ago if this was doable, they would have laughed you out of the room,” says Alexander Huth, a neuroscientist at the University of Texas at Austin and a coauthor on the study. Yukiyasu Kamitani, a computational neuroscientist at Kyoto University who was not involved in the research, writes in an email to The Scientist that it’s “exciting” to see intelligible language sequences generated from a noninvasive decoder. “This study . . . sets a solid ground for [brain-computer interface] applications,” he says.

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David Montgomery in The Washington Post:

Tobias Jones at The Guardian:

Over the course of her distinguished career, Caroline Moorehead has created an oeuvre that is varied and yet also thematically coherent. As well as writing about trailblazing women – Freya Stark, Iris Origo, Martha Gellhorn and Lucie de la Tour du Pin – she has also focused on pacifists, refugees and deportees. Her books are scholarly and readable because she always seems able to find stories that combine history and human rights, female bravery and antifascism (or else nonconformity).

Edda Mussolini is, perhaps, a subject it’s harder to warm to. Benito Mussolini’s first child with Rachele Guidi, Edda was born in 1910, and her early years were marked by poverty, beatings and instability. Her father was very often absent, either at war or at work, in prison or in hospital. On prison visits, Edda was apparently taught to hug him so that he could pass his incendiary articles to his wife. She later said of herself: “I was barefoot, wild and hungry… a miserable child.”

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Katy Waldman at The New Yorker:

The novelist Lydia Millet once told an interviewer that when she first moved to New York, in 1996, she was “amazed” by how people were “relentlessly interested in exclusively the human self.” This myopia—a sort of “inarticulate, ambient smugness about everything”—wasn’t her creed. Millet, who now lives near Tucson, has written more than a dozen books of fiction, one of which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, but she works at the Center for Biological Diversity and holds a master’s in environmental policy. As in life, so in art. Increasingly, fiction studies the “arc of the private individual,” Millet told another interviewer: “The personal struggles of a self and the ultimate triumph of that self over the obstacles in its path.” But Millet is energized, instead, by how feelings are “intermeshed with abstract thought,” with “our place in the wider landscape.” Why, her work demands, are we afraid to die? What are the ethics of wanting what we want?

more here.