I Could Be a Whale Shark
I am worried about tentacles.
How you can still get stung
even if the jelly arm disconnects
from the bell. My husband
swims without me—farther
out to sea than I would like,
buoyed by salt and rind of kelp.
I am worried if I step too far
into the China Sea, my baby
will slow the beautiful kicks
he has just begun since we landed.
The quickening, they call it,
but all I am is slow, a moon jelly
floating like a bag in the sea.
Or a whale shark. Yes—I could be
a whale shark, newly spotted
with moles from the pregnancy—
my wide mouth always open
to eat and eat with a look that says
Surprise! Did I eat that much?
When I sleep, I am a flutefish,
just lying there, swaying back
and forth among the kelpy mess
of sheets. You can see the wet
of my dark eye awake, awake.
My husband is a pale blur
near the horizon, full of adobo
and not waiting thirty minutes
before swimming. He is free
and waves at me as he backstrokes
past. This is how he prepares
for fatherhood. Such tenderness
still lingers in the air: the Roman
poet Virgil gave his pet fly
the most lavish funeral, complete
with meat feast and barrels
of oaky wine. You can never know
where or why you hear
a humming on this soft earth.
a humming on this soft earth.
from Oceanic
Copper Canyon Press, 2018
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The Lord, Soraya Antonius’s vivid chronicle of Palestinian life before the Nakba of 1948, is a novel that moves fast, driven by fury and passion. Tales are told within tales; there are jump cuts and flashbacks. Antonius’s eye is as keen as her wit. The narrator of the book, which was first published in 1986, is an unnamed woman journalist in the Lebanon of the early eighties. She is covering current events—the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacres are obliquely referred to at one point—but she also takes an interest in the region’s past, and is particularly curious to find out about a young man named Tareq, who grew up under the British Mandate and played a significant role in the 1936–1939 Palestinian uprising against colonial rule. Her curiosity leads her to the elderly Miss Alice, an Englishwoman who was Tareq’s teacher in a mission school founded by her father at the start of the twentieth century. Tareq, Miss Alice tells the narrator, was a boy of humble background and an undistinguished student, who, however, possessed uncanny powers that Miss Alice can’t really account for. How he put those powers to use will be the novel’s story.
My hunch is that the contemporary artworks likeliest to one day appear prescient, albeit not always in reassuring ways, will come from para-artistic digital practices, whether artistic experiments with AI; so-called Red Chip art (which Annie Armstrong of Artnet News defines as works with flashy aesthetics that abjure art history); or folk forms such as NFTs, memes, or TikTok lore videos. What these practices have in common is not just that they’re relatively new, with strong ties to digital culture, but also that they’re only somewhat recognizable as great art, or even art at all, under our inherited value systems. Traditionalists gasp, often justifiably, at the ethical and aesthetic challenges AI art poses, or at Red Chip art’s tawdriness, or at digital folk art’s simplicity. But such practices are telling the old culture what’s happening to it, even if the message isn’t what most fine arts audiences want to hear.
If Altman likes you, he will recommend that you read The Beginning of Infinity, by a British physicist who believes all evils and failures are due to insufficient knowledge. “Everything that is not forbidden by laws of nature is achievable, given the right knowledge.” We have entered “the beginning of infinity,” a period of unbounded progress.
A
This paper argues that humanity is on track to develop superintelligent AI systems that would be fundamentally uncontrollable by humans. We define “meaningful human control” as requiring five properties: comprehensibility, goal modification, behavioral boundaries, decision override, and emergency shutdown capabilities. We then demonstrate through three complementary arguments why this level of control over superintelligence is essentially unattainable.
How should we understand the character of the American political present?
I
Seamus Heaney was a self-consciously self-made poet. In his essay ‘Feeling into Words’, he gives one of the best accounts available of ‘finding your voice’ as a writer. There were early stirrings of poetry in listening to his mother recite the Latin grammar of her schooldays; the ‘beautiful sprung rhythms’ of the BBC shipping forecast and ‘the litany of the Blessed Virgin that was part of the enforced poetry’ of a Catholic household. He learned to articulate the feelings these induced through reading English poetry at school, and in particular ‘the heavily accented consonantal noise’ of Gerard Manley Hopkins, in whose ‘staccato’ music Heaney heard an encouraging echo of his own ‘energetic, angular’ Ulster accent.
The mathematical conundrums that Marijn Heule has helped crack in the last decade sound like code names lifted from a sci-fi spy novel: 
For decades, the United Nations has intervened in Haiti in a bid to address persistent political, economic and security crises. To date, all attempts have failed.
‘Perhaps it’s meditation by another name, but at this stage it’s become a necessity’, said Seamus Heaney about his ‘habit of deep preparation’ for poetry readings. Regardless of their size or significance, he would spend at least two or three hours considering what to read.
In the 1970s I went to a lot of very long Bob Wilson performances, among them the legendary Deafman Glance (1970) and A Letter for Queen Victoria (1974). They lasted for hours; some were all night. I often watched from the top of the nosebleed balcony—sometimes wrapped in a sleeping bag, the images onstage mixing with my dreams. Even now I’m not sure whether I dreamed something or saw it in a Bob Wilson performance.