Noah Isenberg at The Paris Review:

Although Wilder père had other plans for his son—a respectable, stable career in the law, an exalted path for good Jewish boys of interwar Vienna—Billie was drawn, almost habitually, to the seductive world of urban and popular culture and to the stories generated and told from within it. “I just fought with my father to become a lawyer,” he recounted for the filmmaker Cameron Crowe in Conversations with Wilder: “That I didn’t want to do, and I saved myself, by having become a newspaperman, a reporter, very badly paid.” As he explains a bit further in the same interview, “I started out with crossword puzzles, and I signed them.” (Toward the end of his life, after having racked up six Academy Awards, Wilder told his German biographer that it wasn’t so much the awards he was most proud of, but rather that his name had appeared twice in the New York Times crossword puzzle: “once 17 across and once 21 down.”)

more here.

Zoë Hu at The Believer:

I am a paranoid person, which, if we’re not going to be fussy about clinical definitions, means I feel a constant unreasonable fear, one ruled by no overarching logic or taxonomy. I am paranoid about my relationships and my work. I am paranoid about rising sea levels, air pollutants, tap water, dark parking lots, and the back seat of my car. I am paranoid about whether I’ve locked the door—really, properly locked the door. I experience frequent bouts of paranoia in regards to the men in my life—what do they get up to when I’m not around?—as well as to many men I do not know. I realize I don’t look like the paranoid type, which is culturally coded as someone white and male, so I am also paranoid about other paranoiacs, what they make of my face and my monosyllabic last name.

In other words, I am fixated on what I must regularly confront yet cannot control. It is a very human condition, if not the human condition. Philip K. Dick once said that “the ultimate in paranoia is not when everyone is against you but when everything is against you.” 

more here.

Gal Beckerman in the New York Times:

Theroux turns 80 in April. For a generation of backpackers now gone gray, the tattered paperback accounts of his treks through China, Africa and South America were a prod to adventure, bibles of inspiration under many a mosquito net. He has a new novel out from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in April, “Under the Wave at Waimea,” and his best-known book (and his own favorite among them), “The Mosquito Coast,” has been adapted into a television series starring his nephew, Justin Theroux, also set to premiere next month.

If this seems like a moment to take stock of an intrepid life and an almost extreme output of writing, Theroux does not see himself as anywhere near done. Before Covid-19 struck, he had plans to go to central Africa. He is deep into another novel and finishing up a new story collection. He himself can’t seem to keep track of the number of books he has written: “Fifty-something maybe?” (It’s actually 56.)

More here.

The Where in My Belly

Scientists say my brain and heart
are 73 percent water—
they underestimate me.

A small island—minis, I emerged
among Minnesota’s northern lakes,
the where of maanomin—wild rice in my belly.

I am from boats and canoes and kayaks,
from tribal ghosts who rise at dawn
dance like wisps of fog on water.

My where is White Earth Nation
and white pine forests,
knees summer stained with blueberries,
pink lady slippers open and wild as my feet.

I grew up where math was Canasta,
where we recited times tables
while ice fishing at twenty below,
spent nights whistling to Northern Lights.

I am from old: medicines barks and teas;
from early—the air damp with cedar
the crack of amik, beaver tails on water.

Their echo now a warning to where—
to where fish become a percentage of mercury,
become a poison statistic;
to where copper mines back against
a million blue acres of sacred.

I am from nibi and ogichidaakweg
women warriors and water protectors, from seed
gatherers and song makers.

The wet where pulse in my belly whispers and repeats
like the endless chant of waves on ledgerock
waves on ledgerock on ledgerock on waves
on water. . .nibi

by Kimberly Blaeser
From Split This Rock

Listen as Kimberly Blaeser reads “The Where in My Belly”.

Graeme Wood in The Atlantic:

When grandmaster jay walked into Million’s Crab, a seafood joint in suburban Cincinnati, the waitstaff looked alarmed. Million’s Crab is a family restaurant, and on that placid November evening, Jay—the supreme commander of the Not Fucking Around Coalition—was wearing body armor rated to take a pistol round directly to the chest. Dressed from mask to shoes in black, he was four hours late to our meeting, and remorseless. “My time is scarce,” he said, making aggressive eye contact. Indeed, of the two of us, I was the one who felt sheepish, not because I was wasting his time but because it occurred to me that while I waited, I could have warned the servers that my dining companion was often armed and that he might look as if he had just stepped out of The Matrix. He sat across from me, in front of a platter of scallops and shrimp that had been hot when I’d ordered it for him an hour before, when the kitchen was closing. I offered him a plastic bib, which he declined. He wouldn’t eat any food, but he requested a San Pellegrino or, in its absence, filtered tap water.

Grandmaster Jay’s group, the NFAC, is a Black militia whose goals, other than to abjure Fucking Around, are obscure. It has a militarylike structure, fields an army of hundreds of heavily armed men and women, subscribes to esoteric racist doctrines, opposes Black Lives Matter, and follows a leader who thinks we live in a period of apocalyptic tribulation signaled by the movements of celestial bodies. Its modus operandi is to deploy a more fearsome Black militia wherever white militias dare to appear. Eventually, it intends to establish a racially pure country called the United Black Kemetic Nation. (“Kemet,” Jay explained, “is the original name of Egypt, which means ‘land of the Blacks.’”) A patch on Grandmaster Jay’s body armor bore the new nation’s initials, UBKN.

More here.

Matthew Sweet in 1843 Magazine:

It’s not an age thing. Jesus was in his 30s when he rolled aside the stone from his tomb for Western culture’s foundational did-you-miss-me? moment. Gloria Swanson was 51 when she inhabited the forgotten body of silent-film star Norma Desmond and vogued down the staircase in “Sunset Boulevard”. That’s younger than Naomi Campbell is now. Why do some comebacks inspire and others appal? The best don’t erase the absence that made them possible or ignore its attendant trauma. When Elvis returned to live touring in 1968, audiences went wild for his exertions as much as his voice, and snatched the sweat-damp towels he tossed in their direction. When Monica Seles returned to tennis two years after a man had stabbed her with a nine-inch knife during a game, the crowd cheered her physical and mental victory over her attacker.

The Son of God fits this pattern too. Scourged, crucified, murdered, He returns in a shape fit for ascent to heaven. No more fieldwork, no more lecturing, no more miraculous catering, only the hereafter. And, we’re assured, it’s not just about Him. If we live the right kind of life, we get to do this too. When the band you loved as a teenager proves it can still fill a stadium, or an actor with whom you shared your youth comes back for a second act, it inspires and consoles. Comebacks suggest that the world is not, as some medieval scholars thought, a body in decay; that life isn’t a process of loss or dilution governed by the second law of thermodynamics. We look at the flowers rising in the parks and gardens, and think ourselves green again.

More here.

Areeba Merriam in Cantor’s Paradise:

Hungarian-born Paul Erdős (1913–1996) was a legendary mathematician of the 20th century. He is famous for having published more research papers than anyone since Euler. Both of his parents used to teach mathematics.

At 16, his father made him familiar with two of his lifetime favorite subjects; set theory and infinite series. Erdős always remembered his parents with great affection and love. At 17, he started university in Budapest then he left for the US during the pre-war years. At 20, he was successful in constructing an elegant proof of famous Bertrand’s postulate in number theory. It stated, “for every number greater than 1, there always exists at least one prime between it and it’s double”.

His work spread across many fields including discrete mathematics, graph theory, mathematical analysis, approximation theory, set theory, and probability theory. He contributed mainly to the branch of combinatorics known as the Ramsey theory. Much of his research centered around cracking formerly unsolved and open problems of the field, rather than constructing new areas in mathematics.

More here.

Richard King in the Sydney Review of Books:

One would have to be a nihilist, of course, not to wish for an end to a pandemic that has claimed well over two and a half million lives. But for those of us interested in ‘interesting times’, and in the opportunities they open up, the global response to COVID-19 has not been without its political excitements. For the second time in twelve years governments around the world moved to underwrite a system that claims to need no government underwriting, with the result that many of the irrationalities of capitalism were thrown into relief. As incomes withered, or dried up completely, many people came to resent the extent to which their lives were governed by non-productive ownership – by rents and mortgages, principally, the profits from which are hoovered up by a parasitic property system and the financiers who sit atop it. At the same time, the invisible hand of the market was shown to be irrelevant to the needs of a society in crisis, while the speed with which the economy tanked, on the back of a dip in discretionary spending, revealed the basic absurdity of a system predicated on consumer choice.

Then there was the really important stuff.

More here.

Lisa Hajjar in Markaz Review:

Since 2010, I have been to Guantánamo 13 times. I can’t go as a scholar conducting research or a concerned citizen, so I go as a journalist. When I tell people that I am heading off to Guantánamo, responses tend to range from bafflement to curiosity. Highly educated and politically-aware acquaintances have said things like: “oh, I forgot that place was still open” and “what’s going on there these days?” The symbolic nadir of the US “war on terror” has faded in popular consciousness without actually fading away. Guantánamo is still open, and one of the things going on there (although disrupted, like everything else, by the global Covid pandemic) is the military commission case against five men charged with plotting the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Those attacks triggered the “war on terror” which is now approaching its twentieth anniversary. The 9/11 case, which started in 2008 and then restarted in 2011, was supposed to provide justice for the thousands of people killed on that terrible day.

More here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKVFXKGVWkg

Alice Blackhurst at n+1:

IN 2017, amid the peak of #balancetonporc, France’s equivalent #MeToo movement, record-breaking crowds of women, keen for an experience of communal catharsis, passed through Sophie Calle’s Beau doublé, Monsieur le marquis!—perhaps as foil against the somber cultural malaise elsewhere. The exhibition, a collaboration between Calle and artist Serena Cocone, was hosted at the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, in Paris, where among taxidermy wild animals and a fetishist’s array of hunting armory, a selection of Calle’s previous projects, including excerpts from the ongoing text work Des histoires vraies (True Stories) and her 1981 piece La Filature (The Shadow), were reactivated alongside new ones. What might have been an unusual location for the work of an internationally acclaimed artist whose brand chords more with the starry entourages of Fashion Week than with dusty 18th-century archives was, in this case, perfectly apt: Calle, who in Suite vénitienne (one of her earliest works) followed a male acquaintance to Venice on a whim after a brief conversation at a cocktail party, has remained committed throughout her career to exposing and subverting the dynamics of the “chase” that patterns heterosexual life. In a minimally furnished room on the second floor, two new, inter-related series, Le chasseur français (The French hunter) and A l’espère (Lying in wait for), scoured these themes of carnal conquest once more.

more here.

David Runciman on Schumpeterian Democracy.

Alex Hanna, Emily Denton, Razvan Amironesei, Andrew Smart, and Hilary Nicole in Logic:

On the night of March 18, 2018, Elaine Herzberg was walking her bicycle across a dark desert road in Tempe, Arizona. After crossing three lanes of a four-lane highway, a “self-driving” Volvo SUV, traveling at thirty-eight miles per hour, struck her. Thirty minutes later, she was dead. The SUV had been operated by Uber, part of a fleet of self-driving car experiments operating across the state. A report by the National Transportation and Safety Board determined that the car’s sensors had detected an object in the road six seconds before the crash, but the software “did not include a consideration for jaywalking pedestrians.” In the moments before the car hit Elaine, its AI software cycled through several potential identifiers for her—including “bicycle,” “vehicle,” and “other”—but, ultimately, was not able to recognize her as a pedestrian whose trajectory would be imminently in the collision path of the vehicle.

How did this happen? The particular kind of AI at work in autonomous vehicles is called machine learning. Machine learning enables computers to “learn” certain tasks by analyzing data and extracting patterns from it. In the case of self-driving cars, the main task that the computer must learn is how to see. More specifically, it must learn how to perceive and meaningfully describe the visual world in a manner comparable to humans. This is the field of computer vision, and it encompasses a wide range of controversial and consequential applications, from facial recognition to drone strike targeting.

Unlike in traditional software development, machine learning engineers do not write explicit rules that tell a computer exactly what to do. Rather, they enable a computer to “learn” what to do by discovering patterns in data. The information used for teaching computers is known as training data. Everything a machine learning model knows about the world comes from the data it is trained on.

More here.

Marta Figlerowicz in Boston Review:

The life of Polish artist and diplomat Józef Czapski (1896–1993) in many ways mirrored the intellectual trajectory of twentieth-century Europe. Yet readers have likely never heard of him. That is in part because, despite being exemplary, Czapski’s work is hard to contextualize. It does not fit neatly as either prewar or postwar. Instead, it reveals an old world still present in the new and seeking to understand what it had become. With new translations of Czapski’s writing and a wonderful new biography by Eric Karpeles, Czapski comes alive for English readers with a depth and clarity previously absent. One can hope, then, that the time for Czapski’s revival has come.

Czapski was a gifted painter but also a compulsive, talented diarist and essayist. In the salons of Europe, Russia, and North America, he mingled with the likes of Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso, André Gide, and Anna Akhmatova; Czapski even appears, in a romantic light, in one of the latter’s poems. Over the years, he had relationships with both men and women, including Canadian heiresses and the younger brother of Vladimir Nabokov.

Born in Prague into an aristocratic family, the young Count Hutten-Czapski spoke German with his mother and French with his governess. He briefly studied law at the Imperial College in St. Petersburg before moving to the newly independent Poland to become an artist. Czapski soon dropped his title and the Germanic surname Hutten; as Józio Czapski, he then moved to Paris with a group of his painter friends, where they lived on a shoestring budget with little support from their families.

More here.

Rick Bragg at the LA Times:

McMurtry, who died last week, was described in one obit as among the most acclaimed writers of the American experience. A long time ago, he wrote a few kind words to me about a book I wrote, so, of course, I was predisposed to love his work; writers are whores that way.

But he could have called me a low-down, sorry S.O.B and I still would have read pretty much everything he wrote. If the point of a good book is to vanish into it, then he was one of the best there ever was. And I always knew, in a world of wasted time, that I hadn’t wasted a second.

Few writers I have ever read breathed such life into words. He showed us the wisdom of Sam the Lion in “The Last Picture Show” and the rage of Woodrow Call and the broken, wandering heart of Augustus McCrae in “Lonesome Dove.”

more here.

Allegro Ma Non Troppo

Life, you’re beautiful (I say)
you just couldn’t get more fecund,
more befrogged or nightingailey,
more anthillful or sproutspouting.

I’m trying to court life’s favour,
to get into its good graces,
to anticipate its whims.
I’m always the first to bow,

always there where it can see me
with my humble, reverent face,
soaring on the wings of rapture,
falling under waves of wonder.

Oh how grassy is this hopper,
How his berry ripely rasps.
I would never have conceived it
if I weren’t conceived myself!

Life (I say) I’ve no idea
what I could compare you to.
No one else can make a pine cone
and then make the pine cone’s clone.

I praise your inventiveness,
bounty, sweep, exactitude,
sense of order – gifts that border
on witchcraft and wizardry.

I just don’t want to upset you,
tease or anger, vex or rile.
For millennia, I’ve been trying
to appease you with my smile.

I tug at life by its leaf hem:
will it stop for me, just once,
momentarily forgetting
to what end it runs and runs?

by Wislawa Szymborska
from View With a Grain of Sand
Harcourt Brace 1993