Gary Marcus in his Substack newsletter:

From a showmanship standpoint, Google’s new robot project PaLM-SayCan is incredibly cool. Humans talk, and a humanoid robot listens, and acts. In the best case, the robot can read between the lines, moving beyond the kind of boring direct speech (“bring me pretzels from the kitchen”) that most robots traffic in (at best) to indirect speech, in which a robot diagnoses your needs and caters to them without bothering you with the details. WIRED reports an example in which a user says “I’m hungry”, and the robot wheels over to a table and comes back with a snack, no futher detail required—closer to Rosie the Robot than any demo I have seen before.

The project reflects a lot of hard work between two historically separate divisions of Alphabet (Everyday Robots and Google Brain); academic heavy hitters like Chelsea Finn and Sergey Levine, both of whom I have a lot of respect for, took part.  In some ways it’s the obvious research project to do now—if you have Google-sized resources (like massive pretrainined language models and humanoid robots and lots of cloud compute)— but it’s still impressive that they got it to work as well as it did. (To what extent? More about that below).

But I think we should be worried. I am not surprised that this can (kinda sorta) be done, but I am not sure it should be done.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

There is no human endeavor that does not have a theory of it — a set of ideas about what makes it work and how to do it well. Music is no exception, popular music included — there are reasons why certain keys, chord changes, and rhythmic structures have proven successful over the years. Nobody has done more to help people understand the theoretical underpinnings of popular music than today’s guest, Rick Beato. His YouTube videos dig into how songs work and what makes them great. We talk about music theory and how it contributes to our appreciation of all kinds of music.

More here.

Daniel Stanley at The Othering & Belonging Institute at UC Berkeley:

However difficult it is to properly gauge the significance of historical events while still living through them, we can surely already state with confidence that the Covid pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine together constitute a truly seismic and transformative sequence of years for the world.

The debate continues on what exactly we can learn today from prior such tumultuous times, but one repeated feature of periods of crisis, already becoming apparent in this contemporary experience, is how they call into question the previously dominant concepts and terms used to diagnose social challenges, and explain the malfunctioning workings of our societies. ‘Polarisation’ – as a way of describing an observed increase in division, extreme views and hostility – is just one such concept in need of re-evaluation.

Of course, like any such general term, ‘polarisation’ has a whole range of usages and meanings, varying in scope and focus. In this case, ranging from a simple dynamic in individual group interactions, to a wider trend within political systems at a national level.

More here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEh2rAj_9IU&ab_channel=jukejointjohnny48

Shamira Ibrahim in The Baffler:

THE WRITER AND SCHOLAR Saidiya Hartman opens her 2008 essay “Venus in Two Acts” with an admission about the challenge she’s taken on: to give life to the story of the “Black Venus,” the “emblematic figure of the enslaved woman in the Atlantic world,” present in the archives in various forms, but never as a full person. “I want to do more than recount the violence that deposited these traces in the archive. I want to tell a story about two girls capable of retrieving what remains dormant—the purchase or claim of their lives on the present—without committing further violence in my own act of narration,” Hartman writes. “Listening for the unsaid, translating misconstrued words, and refashioning disfigured lives—and intent on achieving an impossible goal: redressing the violence that produced numbers, ciphers, and fragments of discourse, which is as close as we come to a biography of the captive and the enslaved.”

Hartman carefully details the process of archival discovery: while she has encountered her two Black Venuses in a legal indictment against a slave ship captain, many others can be found in ledgers, overseers’ journals, or in a traveler’s account of brothels. Circumstances notwithstanding, the end result is the same—an unnamed Black woman, deprived of the ability to tell her story, reduced by a white man to a commodity or a tawdry sexual exploit. Aiming to engage in a reparative exercise, Hartman asks: “How does one recuperate lives entangled with and impossible to differentiate from the terrible utterances that condemned them to death, the account books that identified them as units of value, the invoices that claimed them as property, and the banal chronicles that stripped them of human features?”

More here.

Cassandra Willyard in Scientific American:

The recipe for mammalian life is simple: take an egg, add sperm and wait. But two new papers demonstrate that there’s another way. Under the right conditions, stem cells can divide and self-organize into an embryo on their own. In studies published in Cell and Nature this month, two groups report that they have grown synthetic mouse embryos for longer than ever before. The embryos grew for 8.5 days, long enough for them to develop distinct organs — a beating heart, a gut tube and even neural folds.

The process is far from perfect. Just a tiny fraction of the cells develop these features and those that do don’t entirely mimic a natural embryo. But the work still represents a major advance that will help scientists to see organ development in unprecedented detail. “This is very, very exciting,” says Jianping Fu, a bioengineer at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. “The next milestone in this field very likely will be a synthetic stem-cell based human embryo,” he says.

Masha Gessen in The New Yorker (Photograph by Maxim Shemetov / Reuters):

Darya Dugina, a twenty-nine-year-old Russian television commentator, was laid to rest at an undisclosed location in Moscow on August 23rd. Three days earlier, Dugina had attended a festival called Tradition, a daylong event that, this year, included a lecture by her father, the self-styled political philosopher Aleksandr Dugin, on the metaphysical dualism of historical thinking. The gathering concluded with a concert called “The Russian Cosmos.” Afterward, Darya Dugina drove away in a Toyota Land Cruiser. The car exploded, killing her. Aleksandr Dugin was apparently travelling in a different vehicle, and it seems likely that whoever killed Darya had meant to kill her better-known father. There has since been much speculation about the identity and motives of the killers, but little is known for certain. Still, some theories are better than others.

Western media accounts have portrayed Dugin as a sort of Putin whisperer, the brains behind the Kremlin’s ideology. He is not that, but his story tells a lot about recent Russian history and the current state of Russian society. Dugin came out of the Moscow cultural underground. The son of minor members of the Soviet nomenklatura, he was expelled from college and educated himself by reading banned and restricted literature. When I was researching Dugin’s story for my book “The Future Is History,” an ex-partner of his and the mother of his older child, Evgeniya Debryanskaya, remembered that Dugin, then in his early twenties, procured a copy of Martin Heidegger’s “Being and Time” on microfilm. He did not, of course, have a microfilm reader at home, so he rigged up a device designed for showing simple children’s reels and projected the book onto his desk. The arrangement was not ideal: it showed a barely visible mirror image of the text. Dugin read Heidegger backward, in the dark, and, according to Debryanskaya, lost some of his eyesight in the process. The symbolic potential of this story is staggering. Its literal meaning is informative: Dugin’s ability to self-educate was limited by censorship, isolation, and ignorance.

Fathimath Musthaq in Phenomenal World:

The 2008 crisis heralded a new age in central banking. The scale and nature of central bankers’ interventions was unprecedented. Traditionally, as lenders of last resort, central banks lend at escalating rates against good collateral to solvent institutions in times of crisis. In 2008 central banks broke every rule in the book: deviating from the principle of full collateralization, they lent to non-bank entities and made outright asset purchases. This exposed their balance sheets to various credit, interest-rate, and market risks. The European Central Bank made asset purchases under an “enhanced credit support” program that dealt in public securities of various credit risks and even provided liquidity in foreign currencies, primarily the US dollar.¹ The Bank of England made outright purchases of government bonds while the US Federal Reserve purchased up to 90 percent of all new issues of mortgaged backed securities (MBS) to ensure liquidity in US money markets. The Fed also established swap lines with various central banks, including the Swiss National Bank, the ECB, the BoE, and the Bank of Japan. It went as far as to provide these lines to a select few central banks in the Global South, among them the Central Bank of Brazil and the Bank of Mexico.

Scholars and market watchers have documented and discussed the evolution of crisis-management tools at length. But the most consequential boundary that central banks trespassed was not during the crisis—after all, discretionary measures to prevent a system collapse have been part of central banks’ evolution. The real innovation came in the adoption of crisis tools in noncrisis times, under the banner of so-called unconventional monetary policy.

More here.

Rohan Silva at The Guardian:

Plant blindness. That’s what scientists call the way we humans often fail to notice the staggering diversity and complexity of plant life around us. The philosopher Paco Calvo seems to be mercifully free from this affliction – he runs a laboratory in Spain studying plant behaviour, trying to figure out if that half-dead fern that you forgot to water on the windowsill ought to be classified as “intelligent”.

Some flowers turn towards the sun as it tracks across the sky, and some plants close their leaves when touched, but traits like these are generally assumed to be automatic reflexes, no different to the way your leg jerks out when you get tapped on the knee.

In Planta Sapiens, Calvo tries to show us that our green friends do far more than just blindly react.

more here.

Hillary Kelly at The New Yorker:

Naturalness is the muse’s great gift. Like Helga Testorf, who merely had to stand still for Andrew Wyeth to want to transpose her spirit, Sedgwick had only to walk and talk for Warhol to track her every move on film. “Andy always picks people because they have an amazing sort of essential flame, and he brings it out for the purposes of his films,” the curator Henry Geldzahler once said. “He never takes anybody who has nothing and makes them into something. What he did was recognize that Edie was this amazing creature, and he was able to make her more Edie so that when he got it on camera it would be made available to everybody.” Warhol’s movies captured Sedgwick just being herself: putting on makeup, lying in bed, perching on a couch arm while looking about the room. She appeared in more than a dozen films, such as “Face,” a seventy-minute-long closeup, and “Afternoon,” a scripted “chamber opera” in which Sedgwick and friends gas around in her apartment, high on amphetamines. Sedgwick Wohl, who has spent decades watching her sister on film, observes her as if looking through a high-powered telescope. “What they saw in her was not talent but simply the way she was, transcribed onto the screen,” Sedgwick Wohl writes.

more here.

Molly Young in The New York Times:

Are you prepared for a vision of sizzling sexuality? Picture this. A woman dressed in brown suede brogues and a below-the-knee skirt, her legs obscured by stockings. Sandy-gray hair. A discreet brooch pinned to her blouse, a formal manner of speaking, a keen interest in antiquity and a tendency to suffer from migraines. These qualities may not scream “racy” or “seductive” or “exotic” to you, but you are not the narrator of Julian Barnes’s 25th book.

The siren is Elizabeth Finch, a teacher of adult education courses in London two decades ago. The narrator is her student, the somewhat dimwitted but diligent Neil. On the first day of class, Elizabeth outlines her pedagogical method: “I shall not attempt to stuff you with facts as a goose is stuffed with corn; this would only lead to an engorged liver, which would be unhealthy.” Neil is besotted. Intrigued by Finch’s poise, dazzled by her confidence, he concocts wild fantasies about her extracurricular life: silk pajamas, Italian lakes, French vineyards, mysterious lovers.

When the course ends, Neil bravely invites his crush to lunch, and for 20 years they dine twice or thrice annually. It’s unclear what Elizabeth gets out of the meetings. What Neil gets is the opportunity to be outwitted by a woman of formidable reticence and intellect. He is, if not quite a glutton for punishment, then at least someone with a hearty appetite for it.

More here.

Tanya Gold in New Statesman:

At Althorp, the Northamptonshire estate where she lived as a young woman, there is a drawing of Diana Spencer, round-faced and smiling. It was made when she was a child, and unhappy: her mother, Frances, had left the family. It is a private family artefact, and something else too: an early study in iconography, in making Diana something she was not. Her marriage to Prince Charles made Diana a paradigm. A queen exists to be a paradigm – that is her job – but an unhappy, divorced almost-queen, who died while being chased by the mass media that both deified and abused her, is another category of paradigm entirely. The drawing reminds me that she was once a private individual, but she became something else.

In the 25 years since her death, and the insatiable public mourning that followed, and the royal family’s dash to London to preserve their power, Diana the woman has been obscured by interpretations of Diana “the People’s Princess”. There are films, television shows, memoirs, awards, documentaries, conspiracy theories. There are commemorative plates, coins, dolls, tubs of margarine. There are physical memorials – monuments, statues, and a fountain – where the besotted still pay their respects. Even so, the Diana trail has become strewn with tumbleweed. She is now a collection of emotions and memories and scattered artefacts: a myth. What, if anything, is left of her?

More here.

La Guerre (I)

Humanity i love you
because you would rather black the boots of
success than enquire whose soul dangles from his
watch-chain which would be embarrassing for both

parties and because you
unflinchingly applaud all
songs containing the words country home and
mother when sung at the old howard

Humanity i love you because
when you’re hard up you pawn your
intelligence to buy a drink and when
you’re flush pride keeps

you from the pawn shop and
because you are continually committing
nuisances but more
especially in your own house

Humanity i love you because you
are perpetually putting the secret of
life in your pants and forgetting
it’s there and sitting down

on it
and because you are
forever making poems in the lap
of death Humanity

i hate you

E.E. Cummings
from E.E. Cummings Complete Poems
Liverwright Publishing, New York – London

Traveler, There is no Road

Traveler, your footprints
are the only road, nothing else.
Traveler, there is no road;<
you make your own path as you walk.
As you walk, you make your own road,
and when you look back
you see the path
you will never travel again.
Traveler, there is no road;
only a ship’s wake on the sea.
by Antonio Machado

Caminante, No Hay Camino

Caminante, son tus huellas
el camino y nada más;
Caminante, no hay camino,
se hace camino al andar.
Al andar se hace el camino,
y al volver la vista atrás
se ve la senda que nunca
se ha de volver a pisar.
Caminante, no hay camino
sino estelas en la mar.

by Antonio Machado (Thank you, Abbas— excellent find)

Róisín Tapponi at Frieze:

In the gulf, thirst is a paradigm: it is impossible to think about the desert without thinking about water. The Arabian Desert is also a peninsula, with countries formed from both deserts and ports. I propose thirst trap theory – derived from the slang for a selfie used to elicit an exchange between sexual bodies – as a way of reading this relation between desert and surrounding water, between drought and abundance, in cinema from the Gulf. Ranging from narrative cinema to experimental video, these films are as diverse – and extreme – as the landscape that inspired them.

Using deep time and sweltering geological dreamscapes, Sophia Al Maria’s experimental videos The Future Was Desert I and II (both 2016) explore the political relations between nation states through the imaging of natural resources. We see sublime shots of oil, water and fire exploding across regional landscapes, taken from various scientific, colonial and geographical archives.

more here.

Tom Banham in 1843 Magazine:

The lawns at Tusmore House, a neo-Palladian mansion 15 miles north of Oxford, are so perfectly flat and exactingly shorn that they induce a kind of vertigo. Unlike familiar grass, with its divots and erupting daisies, the grass here feels as though it might evaporate underfoot in a cloud of pixels. On a sticky afternoon last summer, David Hedges-Gower, a four-decade veteran of the turf industry and grass whisperer to the wealthy, inspected what looked to the layman like flawless green carpet and found it wanting.

Paul Gough, Tusmore’s head gardener and the man responsible for the lawns’ day-to-day upkeep, agreed. Ordinarily, he’d mow the grass down to 12mm, just long enough to withstand seasonal variations in temperature and rainfall. But Tusmore’s owner, Wafic Saïd, a Syrian businessman and philanthropist who once helped arrange a $50bn-and-counting arms deal between Britain and Saudi Arabia, had been in residence, so they’d mown golf-green short. Weeks of scorching heat and relentless rain had bruised the turf. There were spots of fungus and clover, as well as encroaching annual meadow-grass, which is subtly different to the bentgrass and fescue that were sown here at great expense. (The difference is too subtle for herbicides – patches of meadow-grass have to be cut out with a pocket knife.)

More here.

Aaron Schuster at Cabinet Magazine:

What if the secret of the Symposium was that it is not so much about love as breaking up? Just as we speak of Platonic love, so we should speak of the Platonic breakup, which is, of course, the ideal form of the breakup. Its formula, invented by Socrates, has two parts:

1) I am nothing.
2) You would be happier with someone else.

In what follows, I will sketch a brief history of this formula, culminating in the peculiar amorous adventure that is psychoanalysis. But first, what does Plato mean by it?

The formula concerns the end of the affair between Socrates and Alcibiades. The dazzlingly brilliant and bewildering philosopher and the dashing, larger-than-life general and politician were one of the great couples of the Golden Age of Athens.

more here.