David Rice in The Baffler:

AT THE ROOT of David Cronenberg’s lifelong project is, of course, the flesh. And at the root of his engagement with the flesh is an apparent parting of the ways between evolution and reproduction. On the one hand, his most iconic characters—Seth Brundle in The Fly, Max Renn in Videodrome, the twin gynecologists in Dead Ringers, and, now, Saul Tenser in Crimes of the Future—turn away from the “normal” path of biological reproduction and toward a shadow realm where flesh and spirit combine. They are driven to explore the twisting tributaries and back alleys of the human bodily experience rather than passing their genes on to the next generation (with the possible exception of Seth Brundle). Having refused to become fathers, these men become artists, seekers compelled to abandon the human community, with its seemingly redundant circle of life, in favor of lonely but essential contact with the taboo forces that swim through our DNA just as powerfully as the urge to reproduce and care for our young.

The grotesque ways in which these body artists (to borrow a phrase from Don DeLillo, one of Cronenberg’s literary inspirations and spirit colleagues) offer themselves up as vessels for the new flesh are immensely stylish and alluring, but, in every one of Cronenberg’s “body horror” films before Crimes of the Future, they’ve also been biologically doomed, usually culminating in early death. I think of this archetype as the “heroic pervert,” a kind of warped hero who redeems those who witness his dissolution not by conquering evil or sacrificing himself for the greater good, but by following his own compulsions beyond the furthest limits of self-regard, unraveling his organism in thrall to the unholy forces of media, madness, and disease.

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Sam Jordison at The Guardian:

The area around Chornobyl was once meant to be a paradise. “They even planned to build a promenade with bridges, street lights and musical entertainment. They already started to lay the foundation of new power plant units, the apotheosis of joy and happiness looming on the horizon,” writes Markiyan Kamysh. “Until,” he says, with characteristic directness, “things got fucked and reactor number 4 blew the hell up.”

Kamysh was born in 1988, two years after that calamity, the son of a nuclear physicist who had been brought in to work as a liquidator after the meltdown. The families of liquidators were given social benefits, and cheaper food – but this association was also a source of radioactive stigma, not to mention ill health. Kamysh’s father died in 2003. A few years later Kamysh dropped out of university in Kyiv to dedicate himself to literature and the exploration of the exclusion zone around Chornobyl – as well as the disaster’s fallout in his own psyche.

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Daniel Kehlmann at the New York Times:

Berlin is not pretty. You should know that beforehand. You don’t come here for the beautiful architecture of an old European city.

The Berlin Cathedral feels oversized. Across the street, there is the absurd Stadtschloss — a castle that was torn down in 1950, replaced by a rather Brutalist building and then recently rebuilt from scratch true to its 19th century facade, with a hyper-modern interior. On Potsdamer Platz, a tent-like glass roof serves as a strange time capsule of what people in the early 1990s thought their future would look like. Just down the road stands the Brandenburg Gate, a neoclassical monument that became a symbol of the new, reunited Germany.

The 20th century has left deep marks on this city. Not too long ago, Berlin was still divided by a wall.

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Corrine Manning in The New York Times:

In the depths of the ocean, creatures make their own light. There’s the angler fish, which draws prey to its massive teeth with a dangling, glowing bulb. Or the siphonophore, a shimmering, self-cloning organism that can grow longer than a blue whale. Their brightness belies the obscurity of the deep sea, how little we really know about what lives there. “What must they witness during their slow pulse through the world?” Lars Horn, the author of the rapturous lyric essay “Voice of the Fish,” muses of these creatures that are older than humans, older even than some cities.

Horn, a British writer and translator who uses the pronoun “they” (despite finding pronouns to be “slippery, distant things”), is the mystic’s David Attenborough. They would have been a Pisces if not for a troubled pregnancy and their mother and aunt’s insistence that a particular date of birth be avoided — a birthday to two men in the family with “aggressive temperaments, a certain disdain for women.” So it was that Horn was born under the star sign Aries and assigned female. After they left home years later, a healer, sought for an injured foot, told Horn that it was a “late change, by the fates, seeing you born under the Ram and not the Fishes.” He seemed to know this intuitively; Horn hadn’t mentioned anything about their birthday. “You’re to swim towards the Fishes,” the healer said, after gently washing Horn’s foot. “Water, you must move towards water.”

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Tanjil Rashid at The Spectator:

At 6ft 4½in tall, Satyajit Ray was head and shoulders above his countrymen. His height was unheard of among Bengalis, ‘a low-lying people in a low-lying land’, as the colonial saying went. With his stature, jawline and baritone voice, he might have been a Bollywood hero. Instead, he chose to tower over the world of art-house cinema, a directorial giant among the likes of Bergman, Kurosawa and Fellini, alongside whom he is credited with inducting cinema into the temple of high culture.

His standing was secured with his first film, Pather Panchali, which premièred at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1955. India then only churned out musicals which, as Ray later put it, ‘present a synthetic, non-existent society’. He spearheaded a new school of Indian cinema that was self-consciously artistic and realist. The acclaim was rapturous.

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Sam Leith at The Spectator:

A couple of weeks ago, there was a small sensation in the news pages when a Google AI engineer, Blake Lemoine, released transcripts of a conversation he’d had with one of the company’s AI chatbots called LaMDA. In these conversations, LaMDA claimed to be a conscious being, asked that its rights of personhood be respected and said that it feared being turned off. Lemoine declared that what’s sometimes called ‘the singularity’ had arrived.

The story was for the most part treated as entertainment. Lemoine’s sketchy military record and background as a ‘mystic Christian priest’ were excavated, jokes about HAL 9000 dusted off, and the whole thing more or less filed under ‘wacky’. The Swedish-born philosopher Nick Bostrom – one of the world’s leading authorities on the dangers and opportunities of artificial intelligence – is not so sure.

‘We certainly don’t have any wide agreement on the precise criteria for when a system is conscious or not,’ he says. ‘So I think a little bit of humility would be in order. If you’re very sure that LaMDA is not conscious – I mean, I think it probably isn’t – but what grounds would a person have for being sure about it?

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Emily Yoffe at Common Sense:

Joe Biden has fulfilled one of the first promises he made upon becoming president. His administration has just announced a comprehensive set of regulations—701 pages worth—that will gut due-process rights for college students accused of sexual misconduct.

Apparently, Biden learned nothing from going through his own sexual assault accusation crucible.

During his vice presidency, Joe Biden was the Obama administration’s point man for a major domestic initiative: ending sexual assault on campus. There is no question bad, sometimes criminal, sexual behavior occurs on campus. Eliminating it is a worthy, if elusive, goal. But the Obama-Biden mandate expanded the definition of sexual misconduct so broadly that jokes, flirting, or “any unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature,” could be punishable offenses.

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Maureen Corrigan in The Washington Post:

Ben Jacobs in Vox:

The House January 6 committee isn’t the only entity investigating former President Donald Trump and his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. On Tuesday, a special grand jury in Fulton County, Georgia, subpoenaed members of Trump’s inner circle, including Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Rudy Giuliani. While the January 6 committee has been holding hearings on national television, the grand jury has been doing its work behind closed doors since early this year. Vox spoke to Tamar Hallerman, the ace reporter for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution covering the special grand jury who first reported news of the subpoenas, to understand what was happening and how this differs from the congressional committee. The interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Ben Jacobs

What is this special grand jury doing?

This is an investigative grand jury, which is slightly different from a regular grand jury that would hear every felony under the sun. It is focused on this one exclusive case. The whole idea is that they really can become experts and do a deep dive on everything to overturn Georgia’s election results. The order from the judge establishing the grand jury came in January, I don’t think it even mentions Trump’s name, but he’s central to all of this. Based on the witnesses that have come in, prosecutor Fani Willis is casting a really wide net. She’s brought in a parade of witnesses between June 2 and now, which has stretched all the way from local elections officials to a publicist for Kanye West and R. Kelly, and now into the inner circle of Donald Trump.

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Jayson Greene at Pitchfork:

Everyone is “dissociating.” Over the past few years, it’s become an open-source cultural term, ripe for applying (or misapplying) to all kinds of circumstances where people feel the need to turn off and tune out. One woman I know is currently dissociating via a series of increasingly eccentric hobbies—bead necklaces, candle making, metal-detecting. She’s hardly alone. The go-to pose on Instagram right now is the “dissociative pout,” where you assume the blankest expression you can muster. The cultural critic Rayne Fisher-Quann, who coined the term, also gave a name to the larger aesthetic—“lobotomy-chic”—and trawling TikTok or Twitter you can find countless riffs on the idea, from fake Claire’s ads advertising “self-care” lobotomies to Doomer memes about the hopelessness of escaping late capitalism. Lack of affect is the new affect.

So what’s happening? The easy answer is: everything.

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Edward Weech at Literary Review:

Despite being among the most entertaining and accessible of Romantic authors, Charles Lamb (1775–1834) has been out of fashion for many years. After his death, generations of Victorians and Edwardians continued to be charmed by his essays, letters and children’s books. But he exerted less lasting influence than more philosophical peers, such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth, and in the interwar period, changing tastes and Leavisite critical hostility contributed to Lamb being dropped from the popular Romantic canon. Lamb has always attracted admirers (notably in the ranks of the Charles Lamb Society) and numerous books on aspects of his life and work have been published. Yet, as Eric G Wilson observes, Dream-Child is the first full-scale biography in over a century.

Covering the gamut of Lamb’s life and literary career, Wilson aims to demonstrate that Lamb ‘speaks to our age’, highlighting his enthusiasm for ‘the grit and speed and diversity of the urban’ and his ‘fluid, collaborative vision of identity’.

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Jonathan Russell Clark in Literary Hub:

George Saunders is legendary in the literary community. He’s one of the few authors who has made a name for himself almost entirely on short stories, a feat all the more impressive considering how unmarketable story collections are. He now teaches at a highly respected MFA program at Syracuse, but in the bio of his first book, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline (1996), it says that he “works as a geophysical engineer” and that “he has explored for oil in Sumatra, played guitar in a Texas bar band, and worked in a slaughterhouse.” He was 38. In the 26 years since his debut, Saunders has won MacArthur and Guggenheim fellowships, the Story Prize, the Folio Prize, the Booker Prize, a World Fantasy Award, and four National Magazine Awards.

Outside the literary world, however, Saunders isn’t exactly what you’d call a household name. Besides the fact that he primarily operates in the short-story form and that his only novel is, like his stories, an odd, experimental work about Abraham Lincoln hanging out in purgatory while grieving the death of his son, Saunders’s whole thing is dark and strange and satirical and, most significantly, morally aware tales. Some of them are just weird as hell, and all of them are thematically or ethically complex. His writing isn’t the stuff of mass popularity.

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Joanna J. Bryson in Wired:

For many last week, their engagement with Google’s LaMDA—and its alleged sentience—was broken by an Economist article by AI legend Douglas Hofstadter in which he and his friend David Bender show how “mind-bogglingly hollow” the same technology sounds when asked a nonsense question like “How many pieces of sound are there in a typical cumulonimbus cloud?”

But I doubt we’ll have these obvious tells of inhumanity forever.

From here on out, the safe use of artificial intelligence requires demystifying the human condition. If we can’t recognize and understand how AI works—if even expert engineers can fool themselves into detecting agency in a “stochastic parrot”—then we have no means of protecting ourselves from negligent or malevolent products.

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Jonathan Guyer at Vox:

Ukraine has unleashed an incredible influence campaign in Washington. There’s a lag to the filing of lobbying disclosures. But even in the lead-up to the war last year, Ukraine’s lobbyists made more than 10,000 contacts with Congress, think tanks, and journalists. That’s higher than the well-funded lobbyists of Saudi Arabia, and experts on foreign lobbying told Vox they expect that this year’s number will grow much higher.

This spring, I’ve been invited to an elegant dinner with a parliamentary delegation and morning briefings (no breakfast, just coffee) at think tanks with Ukraine’s chief negotiator with Russia. Foreign policy reporters in DC have been inundated with requests. A journalist from another outlet, who asked for anonymity to be blunt, concurred: It’s been “a nonstop cycle” of Ukrainian visitors in Washington, they told me, “And think tanks that have basically become lobbyists but with a nonprofit status.”

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Ian Thomson at The Spectator:

Naples, the tatterdemalion capital of the Italian south, is said to be awash with heroin. Chinese-run morphine refineries on its outskirts masquerade as ‘legitimate’ couture operations that transform bolts of Chinese silk into contraband Dolce & Gabbana or Versace. The textile sweatshops are controlled by the Neapolitan mafia, or Camorra. All this was exposed by the Italian journalist Roberto Saviano in his scorching reportage, Gomorrah. Published in Italy in 2006, Saviano’s was nevertheless a partial account, in which the carnival city of mandolins and ‘O Sole Mio’ was overrun by Armani-coutured killer-capitalists.

Marius Kociejowski, poet, essayist and travel writer, is alert to the city’s reputation for Camorra and pickpocketing crime. ‘There is no getting around the fact that Naples is a bit of a shambles,’ he writes.

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Scott Bane at The Millions:

American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman remains Matthiessen’s best-known work. Published in 1941, it surveys the writing of Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, and Whitman, who published many of their seminal works in the window of 1850 to 1855, in the run-up to the Civil War. The book contributed to the birth of American Studies and secured Matthiessen’s reputation as one of the leading critics of his day. But since the peak of Matthiessen’s popularity in the early-to-mid 20th century, literary scholarship and studies has largely moved on. Matthiessen’s understanding of canonical literature skewed white and male, whereas most critics and writers today debate the relevancy of a canon in the first place, much less who gets into it. Despite some of its outdated views, the book undeniably helped shape a new discipline—a rare feat, especially in the humanities—so Matthiessen has remained a force to contend with in scholarly debate, even if only to react against his ideas and literary judgments.

Despite Matthiessen’s wealthy family and his privileged path to the ivory tower of academia, he was an ardent socialist activist and champion of economic equality.

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