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Dina Nayeri in The Guardian:

All day, all night the body intervenes,” wrote Virginia Woolf in On Being Ill. It “blunts or sharpens, colours or discolours, turns to wax in the warmth of June, hardens to tallow in the murk of February. The creature within can only gaze through the pane – smudged or rosy; it cannot separate off from the body.”

On Boxing Day 2022, in Rome with his Italian partner Isabella, Hanif Kureishi felt dizzy while sitting at the table. He fainted, landing on his neck and becoming tetraplegic as a result. He spent 2023 in Italian and English hospitals, being prodded, rearranged and invaded while sending dispatches to his fans (dictated to Isabella and to his son, Carlo) via his popular Substack. “I will never go home again. I have no home now, no centre. I am a stranger to myself. I don’t know who I am any more. Someone new is emerging.” Now, those dispatches have been collected, edited, and expanded into a memoir.

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John Adams in The New York Times:

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Lucy Schiller in the Columbia Journalism Review:

There were, of course, other ways to feel connected with humanity on a plane. You could notice a slight indentation left in the seat from the person before you, or the length to which they had extended (or shortened) their seatbelt, which would now become yours. You didn’t have to turn to the back of the in-flight magazine to see some stranger’s—or, more likely, strangers’—handiwork on the crossword, or wonder what flavor of sticky substance someone had spilled across its pages. Nor was it required to retrace the doodles drawn on the ads for UNTUCKit shirts, It’s Just Lunch, Hard Rock Café, Wellendorff jewelry, companies selling gold coins, and Big Green Eggs. But it’s clear that with the last print issue of Hemispheres, the in-flight magazine of United Airlines, and the last such magazine connected to a major US carrier (with the exception of Hana Hou!, for Hawaiian Airlines), it is the end of an era.

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Elizabeth Gibney in Nature:

John Hopfield, one of this year’s winners of the Nobel Prize in Physics, is a true polymath. His career started with probing the physics of solid states during the field’s heyday in the 1950s before moving to the chemistry of haemoglobin in the late 1960s, and studying DNA synthesis in the decade that followed.

In 1982, he devised a brain-like network in which neurons — which he modelled as interacting particles — formed a kind of memory. The ‘Hopfield network’, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize, is now widely seen as a building-block of machine learning, which underpins modern artificial intelligence (AI). Hopfield shared the award with AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton at the University of Toronto in Canada.

Now 91 years old, Hopfield, an emeritus professor at Princeton University in New Jersey, spoke to Nature about whether his prizewinning work was really physics and why we should worry about AI.

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Francis Fukuyama at Persuasion:

The publication of new interviews with Donald Trump’s longstanding chief of staff John Kelly have been in the news since last week, and the Harris campaign has picked up on Kelly’s use of the word “fascist” to describe his former boss. This has reignited a longstanding debate over whether Trump and his MAGA movement represent the threat of genuine fascism in the United States were he to be re-elected.

This debate misses the point in several respects. Most Americans don’t have a clear definition of “fascist” in their minds, except to know that it means something very bad. But they also know that it’s been an epithet thrown around a lot, especially at Republican candidates. Indeed, as one Republican campaign ad shows, virtually every one of their presidential candidates over recent decades has been described as a fascist by the Democrats.

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David Katzenstein at Commonweal:

In the brief introduction to Distant Journeys, a new collection of photography assembled from trips undertaken over nearly five decades and across six continents, David Katzenstein tells us that his “passion for discovery” began early. Perhaps it was when he was only three years old, gripping his father’s back as their “frisky gray mare” galloped across a beach in Cuba, or when he visited Norway at age seven and watched a waterfall plunge half a kilometer into the sea below. It’s not surprising that he became a photographer: both memories, distant but visually and metaphorically precise, evoke the shifting perspectives that have defined his work throughout his career.

At first glance, the few images presented here, though taken in places as far-flung as Senegal, India, and Sicily, are neither exotic nor extraordinary. They show people going about their daily lives: milling around in a market, dancing in a sweaty living room, snapping photos at a festival with their phones. But there’s mystery here, too.

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Dating in the Apocalypse Bunker

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Diane Fieldes in R:

Capitalism thwarts and stunts the creativity of human beings. It robs the mass of the population of control over their own labour, and therefore over production generally. It denies the vast majority of people creative expression in their daily work lives, and this affects all of life. Workers are robbed not just of artistic creativity but even of our potential to be an audience for art. Yet there is a constant struggle to free humanity’s potential. And there have always been troublesome artists and troublesome art. The contradictions of capitalism mean that it is possible, at least to some extent, for artistic expression to develop in opposition to the dominant trajectory of society. Bertolt Brecht’s poem “Motto” makes the point:

In the dark times

Will there also be singing?

Yes, there will also be singing.

About the dark times.

But at high points of struggle, the possibilities of artistic expression expand exponentially. One of the chief aims of socialist revolution, according to the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky, is the “awakening of human personality in the masses – who were supposed to possess no personality”.

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Lola Butcher in Undark Magazine:

Like many surgeons, Marty Makary used to routinely treat appendicitis by removing the patient’s appendix, a procedure performed nearly 300,000 times a year in the U.S. That changed about a decade ago after he read a research study that found antibiotics may be an effective alternative. Despite subsequent research confirming that appendectomies can often be avoided, Makary estimates only about half of surgeons have accepted the idea. “That means whether or not you go under the knife for appendicitis today in America depends on who’s on call when you walk into the emergency department,” he writes in “Blind Spots: When Medicine Gets It Wrong, and What It Means for Our Health.”

In detailed behind-the-scenes case studies, Makary, a surgeon and public health researcher at Johns Hopkins University, reveals how and why physicians often salute bad science and baseless opinions at the peril of their patients. Among other things, Makary claims, the medical establishment created the opioid epidemic and the peanut allergy epidemic. Tens of thousands of women have died prematurely because of misinterpreted data about the danger of hormone replacement therapy. The U.S. government banned silicone breast implants for 14 years without evidence they caused harm. Physicians’ overuse of antibiotics is likely causing untold suffering. Doctors still tell overweight people to eat low-fat foods, even though low-fat diets are associated with obesity and diabetes.

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Rachel Ossip at n+1:

New image-making technologies — whether the printing press, the camera, or satellite imaging — change our perception of the world, which in turn changes our behaviors. The question at hand is: What are these algorithmic images teaching us to see, say, and do?

As of January 2024, GenAI text-to-image tools produced about thirty-four million images per day. This number is still dwarfed by the daily count of digital photographs, but for how long? From here on out, it’s safest to assume that any image you encounter might be generated. What differentiates these images is not their lack of humanity but their intense abundance of it: all the alienated intelligence, historical strata, and linguistic tics embedded and reproduced within them. Each prompter sets off a huge chain of networked collaboration with artists and academics, clickworkers and random internet users, across time and space, engaging in one massive, multicentury, ongoing game of Eat Poop You Cat. Like it or not, we all — whether pre-algorithmic image makers or self-described AI artists — will have to learn to play.

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Damion Searls at Literary Hub:

In my late twenties, when I was interested in maybe becoming a translator but didn’t know how to go about doing such a thing, my mother suggested I try getting in touch with our old neighborhood friend Edie. I had read Dr. Seuss at her apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, later babysat her son. She’s stopped teaching and become a translator, my mother said. What language? I asked. My mother didn’t know, maybe Spanish?

Wait a minute, Edie Grossman was Edith Grossman, legendary translator of García Márquez and soon to be of Cervantes?

I got back in touch, and Edie kindly agreed to let me send her my first translation effort, a short descriptive vignette by Peter Handke. She knew no German, had never read Handke, but took a look. Along with being encouraging about my translation and nicer than it deserved, she gave me some advice: Don’t use “-ing” words if you can help it, she said, they’re weak in English. Don’t say there’s a gleaming in the snow, say there’s a gleam; instead of a cocoon hanging in the trees, say it hung in the trees. She circled three of the “-ing” words in my translation and said that those were all right but I should recast the rest. When I looked back at the German, those three—only those three—had the “-d” verb suffix analogous to “-ing.” The verb I had translated “was hanging” could be “hung”; the noun could be a gleam, not a gleaming.

In telling this story over the years, I’ve found that other translators tend to be less impressed by it than nontranslators. But at the time I was one of those nontranslators, and it gave me an eerie sense of being in the presence of greatness: Grossman knew what she was doing, Handke knew what he was doing, and they could commune with each other right through me.

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Ted Nordhaus and Adam Stein at the Breakthrough Institute:

If last month’s announcement by Microsoft and Constellation Energy that they planned to restart Three Mile Island was a potent symbol of nuclear energy’s changing fortunes and importance to efforts to decarbonize the US electricity system, this month’s announcements by Google and Amazon likely tell us a lot more about where the US nuclear sector is heading. It is one thing to reopen a recently shuttered nuclear plant like Three Mile Island, quite another to build new reactors. Revitalizing the nuclear sector, such that it might play a major role in meeting US climate ambitions, will require building several hundred new reactors, 200GW worth by 2050 according to Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm and other Biden administration officials.

Over the last decade, there has been a sometimes quiet, sometimes open debate within the nuclear sector about whether the future of the technology would look much like its past. Would we see predominantly large conventional light water reactors built and operated by regulated monopoly utilities, or does successfully rebooting the sector require different technologies and business models better suited to the range of use cases where nuclear might play a significant role and the changing realities of the US utility sector.

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Wendy Brown & Francis Wade in the Boston Review:

Trump is symptom, not cause, of the “crisis of democracy.” Trump did not turn the nation in a hard-right direction, and if the liberal political establishment doesn’t ask what wind he caught in his sails, it will remain clueless about the wellsprings and fuel of contemporary antidemocratic thinking and practices. It will ignore the cratered prospects and anxiety of the working and middle classes wrought by neoliberalism and financialization; the unconscionable alignment of the Democratic Party with those forces for decades; a scandalously unaccountable and largely bought mainstream media and the challenges of siloed social media; neoliberalism’s direct and indirect assault on democratic principles and practices; degraded and denigrated public education; and mounting anxiety about constitutional democracy’s seeming inability to meet the greatest challenges of our time, especially but not only the climate catastrophe and the devastating global deformations and inequalities emanating from two centuries of Euro-Atlantic empire. Without facing these things, we will not develop democratic prospects for the coming century.

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Elisa Gabbert in Georgia Review:

I think this is important: memories and ideas happen in a place. An essay is a place for ideas; it has to feel like a place. It has to give one the feeling of entering a room. 

The architect Christopher Alexander has written that “the experience of entering a building influences the way you feel inside the building.” “If the transition is too abrupt there is no feeling of arrival.” He cites a report called “Fairs, Exhibits, Pavilions, and their Audiences,” in which the authors describe observing people drift in and out of various exhibits, impassive and unengaged. There was one exhibit, however, where visitors had to cross a “huge, deep-pile, bright orange carpet on the way in.” The exhibit itself was no better than the others, they said, but people lingered there because they’d made a journey of sorts to enter. They’d crossed a kind of Willy Wonka or Wizard of Oz threshold, into a different realm. They felt changed. 

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