Edward Sorel at the New York Times:

In April 1906, Czar Nicholas caved in to protests from around the world, and released Maxim Gorky from the prison into which he had thrown him. Mark Twain and other writers, hearing that the celebrated author of “The Lower Depths” had been freed, invited him to New York City, and Gorky, still harassed by the secret police, accepted. With him on the voyage was the actress Maria Andreyeva.

Docking in Hoboken, Gorky was cheered by thousands of Russian immigrants, and a day later he was the guest of honor at a white-tie dinner arranged by Twain. Gorky, who spoke no English, came with an interpreter. Through him, he implored the guests to donate money to aid his Bolshevik comrades in overthrowing the czar.

more here.

Jonathan Watts in The Guardian:

Elizabeth Kolbert’s favourite movie is the end-of-the-world comedy Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. For those who need a quick recap, this cold war film features a deranged US air force general who orders a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union using weapons developed by a mad Nazi scientist played by Peter Sellers. A last-minute glitch almost forestalls an apocalyptic war, but a gung-ho B-52 pilot has other ideas. He opens the bomb doors and mounts the H-bomb as if it were a horse, waving his hat and whooping as he rides the missile towards the world’s oblivion. No heroism could be more misguided. No movie could end with a blunter message: how on Earth can we humans trust ourselves with planet-altering technology?

The same absurdly serious question lies at the heart of Kolbert’s new book, Under a White Sky. The Sixth Extinction, her previous book, won a Pulitzer prize for its investigation into how mankind has devastated the natural world. Now she has widened her gaze to whether we can remedy this with ingenious technological fixes – or make things worse. “There was definitely a question left hanging: now we have become such a dominant force on planet Earth, and created so many problems through our intervention, what happens next?”, she says.

In Under a White Sky she examines cutting-edge scientific advances: how much hope can we place in gene-modification, geoengineering and assisted evolution? To what extent can we repair the mess we have made? Thanks to humans, the planet is heating dangerously fast, there is now more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than at any time in millions of years, the extinction rate of other species is hundreds, maybe thousands, of times above natural levels, and just about every planetary warning gauge is heading further into the red. Are there mega-solutions out there for these mega-problems?

More here.

Poignant Moment, listening to “Lakes” played by
the Pat Metheny Group, Sunset Beach, Summer,
1984

The song comes over me like a wheat field, my face
brushed by golden stalks

My spirit moves forward like a blind one and when
things touch me… I see them

How could I know there was so much tenderness
hidden in things, in my flesh?

How could I know the love for the white paint for
the porch of the house where it clings
and flakes? How could I know my daughter
would come back?

How could I know about the air or the inquiring,
efficient blood, returning to the cells?

I see the love of the pale blue wind for our clothes,
blown out from the line,

The wind loves our house, whistling through tiny
cracks, blowing steadily toward us.

There is something in me that listens and stirs.
Everything flows, grasping. Everything is
a kind of attachment, a music; time aching
through us.

It is too much to feel. I put down my pad. Even
breathing is a kind of ceaseless music.

I see we cannot rest, ever. We seek for love,
continually, carried along like dust, swept
across lakes. How did I ever come to be
here, to know these people, to love them?

Our need for love exceeds us, reaching ahead,
dark hair blowing like a torch in the halls
of the old castle. It goes ahead, looking
foe signs, listening, searching.

And then the wind catches it suddenly and lifts it,
swift and beautiful, carries it far out over
the lakes- sail without a boat, banner
of our incorrigible longings.

by Lou Lipsitz
from JerryJazzMusician

Emily Mortimer in the New York Times:

I’d read “Lolita” in college, and I was too lazy to bother to read it again when preparing for my part in “The Bookshop.” I was already a huge fan of Nabokov’s — I had bought copies of his memoir, “Speak, Memory,” in bulk to hand out to my friends at college, and I had worn thin his “Lectures on Russian Literature,” which are as withering as they are brilliant. (I’ll never forget my shocked delight at his excoriation of Dostoyevsky as “a mediocre writer with wastelands of literary platitudes.”)

But I’d been talking so knowledgeably about “Lolita” to the press that I was overcome with a kind of sheepish compulsion to read it again, after the fact. I bought a copy and I read it, and I realized as I did that I had absolutely and for certain never read it before. I can’t have done. Any expertise I’d claimed to have on the subject of “Lolita” was invented. All I knew must have come only from SparkNotes, plot summaries and crib sheets, and maybe from watching the movie. Because if I had ever read “Lolita,” I would have certainly remembered the experience.

More here.

Paul Ratner in Big Think:

Does history have a goal? Is it possible that all the human societies that existed are ultimately a prelude to establishing a system where one entity will govern everything the world over? The Oxford University philosopher Nick Bostrom proposes the “singleton hypothesis,” maintaining that intelligent life on Earth will at some point organize itself into a so-called “singleton” – one organization that will take the form of either a world government, a super-intelligent machine (an AI) or, regrettably, a dictatorship that would control all affairs.

Other forms of a singleton may exist, and, ultimately, Bostrom believes one of them will come into existence. The philosopher argues that historically there’s been a trend for our societies to converge in “higher levels of social organization”. We went from bands of hunter gatherers to chiefdoms, city-states, nation states and now multi-national corporations, the United Nations and so forth, all the way to globalization – one of President Donald Trump’s favorite targets for attack.

More here.

Nick Gillespie in Reason:

Why did prescription opioids bring so much misery to the small towns of postindustrial America?

The standard narrative puts the blame on OxyContin, a powerful painkiller supposedly pushed on rural Americans by the profiteers at Purdue Pharma, which ended up filing for bankruptcy and settling criminal charges with the federal government for $8.3 billion. In this telling, the opioid epidemic is a morality tale of capitalism run amok and regulations made toothless by anti-government zealots.

Sally Satel, a practicing psychiatrist who works at a methadone clinic in Washington, D.C., has a more complicated story to tell. In 2018, she moved to Ironton, Ohio, an economically depressed town in Appalachia, where she worked with patients and social service providers. Satel doesn’t stint on criticism of drug makers, but she says that the opioid crisis is an outgrowth of a century-old tradition of medicating pain as a way of tending to the broken bodies of the region’s laborers.

More here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qw44w7Tvz2I&ab_channel=PhilosophyOverdose

Uilleam Blacker at the LARB:

Despite his stature as a giant of Soviet Ukrainian literature, Bazhan remains all but unknown outside Ukraine. His work is formally sophisticated, his language rich, his subject matter multilayered. Translating him is, thus, no mean feat. But on top of that, for much of the 20th century, Bazhan’s pre-Party existence, and thus much of his best work, was unknown or inaccessible to potential translators. It is fitting, then, that the editors of this new volume of Bazhan’s work, Oksana Rosenblum, Lev Fridman, and Anzhelika Khyzhnia, have turned to the poet’s earlier poetry. The volume takes us through selections from Bazhan’s first three books, published in the giddy experimental atmosphere of the 1920s, before tackling some longer and more formally, thematically, and politically complex works from the early 1930s. Indeed, one of the most fascinating aspects of this book is the way it reveals the tension between Bazhan’s mercurial, untrammeled poetic genius and the creeping ideological strictures of Stalinism.

more here.

Laura Marris at The Point:

It’s a little-known fact that Camus worked briefly as a meteorologist. For almost a year, from 1937-38, he wore a lab coat at the Algiers Geophysics Institute and catalogued measurements of atmospheric pressure from hundreds of weather stations across North Africa. The data had been piling up, and despite the arrogance of their imperial ambitions, the men who ran the Institute couldn’t attract enough funding. They didn’t have the money to hire a scientist trained for this “exacting and, in effect, stupefying task.”³ Nonetheless, Camus’s supervisor, Lucien Petitjean, was pleased with his work. By the end of his time at the Institute, Camus had plotted curves for 27 years of barometric pressures from 121 weather stations. He also made calculations, averaging monthly meteorological data. This work must have given him a granular picture of the weather, one that was so dry and clinical it was at odds with his experience of the natural world. “Like in all sciences of description (statistics—which collects facts—) the biggest problem in meteorology is a practical problem: that of replacing missing observations,” he wrote in his notebook. “Temperature varies from one minute to the next,” he clarified. “This experiment shifts too much to be stabilized into mathematical concepts. Observation here represents an arbitrary slice of reality.”

more here.

Amanda Marcotte in Salon:

It’s early, but Republicans have already seized on their strategy for winning the 2022 and 2024 elections. Of course, it does not depend on mundane tactics like “running on their record” or “making robust arguments about how their policies are better than their opponents.” The GOP is instead returning to the well that has, time and again, paid off handsomely: feigning umbrage over culture war flashpoints, usually ones wholly invented by the right or propped up with lies, to distract from substantive policy debates that actually impact American lives.

And it will probably work — again— because Democrats, hamstrung by their own inability to end the Senate filibuster, will not be able to pass substantive legislation they can tout as accomplishments in future campaigns. And so the election will come down to the Great Potato Head and Dr. Seuss Wars of 2022. Even more unfortunate, truly vulnerable people — like those who are part of the trans community — are also in the crosshairs, as the favored target for the culture wars that Republicans want to wage ahead of the next election. For those of you blissly unaware of what some 20th century children’s artifacts — Dr. Seuss and Potato Head — have to do with politics, well, let me briefly explain.

Conservatives are fanning out on Fox News and other right-wing media, as well as in the hallowed chambers of Congress, to spread lies about these childhood mainstays being “canceled” due to imaginary liberal censorship. It’s not true, of course, but that’s never stopped the right-wing noise machine before and it won’t now.

With Dr. Seuss, the issue comes down to the children’s book author’s estate deciding not to continue publishing some of the more obscure titles because they include racist imagery that runs against the childrens’ author’s own lifelong commitment to progressive politics. Importantly, most of his titles, especially the ones that are most beloved by the public, such as “Green Eggs and Ham” and “The Grinch Who Stole Christmas” will continue to be published. But conservatives took this nugget as an excuse to go buck wild with lies about Dr. Seuss being “canceled.”

More here.

Alex Fox in Smithsonian:

A new study asks the question: Do conversations end when people want them to? The short answer, it turns out, is no. The study, published this week in the journal the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, took a two-pronged approach. The first piece was an online survey completed by 806 people that asked a series of questions about a conversation they recently had with an intimate friend or family member. The questions queried the participant whether there was a moment they had wanted the conversation to end and to estimate when that moment was in relation to when the talk reached its conclusion. The second part of the study involved 252 people being paired up with strangers in the lab to chat about whatever they felt like for anywhere between one and 45 minutes.

In the online survey debriefing a recent intimate conversation, 67 percent of the respondents said they wanted the conversation to end before it actually did, and most had secretly wished the chat had been either 50 percent longer or 50 percent shorter than it was, reports Cathleen O’Grady for Science. “Whatever you think the other person wants, you may well be wrong,” says Adam Mastroianni, a psychology researcher at Harvard University and the study’s lead author, tells Rachel Nuwer of Scientific American. “So you might as well leave at the first time it seems appropriate, because it’s better to be left wanting more than less.”

More here.

Equinox: Greta in Poland

Because they were rich and clever, all
the ambassadors designed an echo chamber
of glass and platitudes, and took turns denying
the future. And because they were old, only
the next few years mattered, and so they pushed around
tarnished words like chess pieces in their narrow grid:

progress, growth, stability—

words any child could see were obscene, were
a screen obscuring catastrophe. So Greta stood
and showed them what maturity looks like,
what truth sounds like,
what leadership feels like,
then she went home to change us.

by Kim Stafford  
from The Poetry Foundation

Yuval Noah Harari in the Financial Times:

How can we summarise the Covid year from a broad historical perspective? Many people believe that the terrible toll coronavirus has taken demonstrates humanity’s helplessness in the face of nature’s might. In fact, 2020 has shown that humanity is far from helpless. Epidemics are no longer uncontrollable forces of nature. Science has turned them into a manageable challenge.

Why, then, has there been so much death and suffering? Because of bad political decisions.

In previous eras, when humans faced a plague such as the Black Death, they had no idea what caused it or how it could be stopped. When the 1918 influenza struck, the best scientists in the world couldn’t identify the deadly virus, many of the countermeasures adopted were useless, and attempts to develop an effective vaccine proved futile.

It was very different with Covid-19. The first alarm bells about a potential new epidemic began sounding at the end of December 2019. By January 10 2020, scientists had not only isolated the responsible virus, but also sequenced its genome and published the information online. Within a few more months it became clear which measures could slow and stop the chains of infection. Within less than a year several effective vaccines were in mass production. In the war between humans and pathogens, never have humans been so powerful.

More here.

Will Douglas Heaven in the MIT Technology Review:

The search for AI has always been about trying to build machines that think—at least in some sense. But the question of how alike artificial and biological intelligence should be has divided opinion for decades. Early efforts to build AI involved decision-making processes and information storage systems that were loosely inspired by the way humans seemed to think. And today’s deep neural networks are loosely inspired by the way interconnected neurons fire in the brain. But loose inspiration is typically as far as it goes.

Most people in AI don’t care too much about the details, says Jeff Hawkins, a neuroscientist and tech entrepreneur. He wants to change that. Hawkins has straddled the two worlds of neuroscience and AI for nearly 40 years. In 1986, after a few years as a software engineer at Intel, he turned up at the University of California, Berkeley, to start a PhD in neuroscience, hoping to figure out how intelligence worked. But his ambition hit a wall when he was told there was nobody there to help him with such a big-picture project. Frustrated, he swapped Berkeley for Silicon Valley and in 1992 founded Palm Computing, which developed the PalmPilot—a precursor to today’s smartphones.

But his fascination with brains never went away. Fifteen years later, he returned to neuroscience and set up the Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience (now at Berkeley). Today he runs Numenta, a neuroscience research company based in Silicon Valley. There he and his team study the neocortex, the part of the brain responsible for everything we associate with intelligence. After a string of breakthroughs in the last few years, Numenta changed its focus from brains to AI, applying what it has learned about biological intelligence to machines.

More here.  And also 15 years ago Jeff Hawkins wrote a book about how human brains work which I wrote about here at 3QD.

Ross Douthat in the New York Times:

No problem concerns journalists and press-watchers so much these days as the proliferation of conspiracy theories and misinformation on the internet. “We never confronted this level of conspiracy thinking in the U.S. previously,” Marty Baron, the former executive editor of The Washington Post, told Der Spiegel in a recent interview. His assumption, widely shared in our profession, is that the internet has forged an age of false belief, encouraged by social media companies and exploited by Donald Trump, that requires new thinking about how to win the battle for the truth.

Some of that new thinking leads to surprising places. For instance, my colleague Kevin Roose recently reported that some experts wish that the Biden administration would appoint a “reality czar” — a dystopian-sounding title, he acknowledged, for an official charged with coordinating anti-disinformation efforts — as “the tip of the spear for the federal government’s response to the reality crisis.”

Meanwhile, my fellow Opinion writer Charlie Warzel recently explored the work of the digital literacy expert Michael Caulfield, who argues that the usually laudable impulse toward critical thinking and investigation is actually the thing that most often leads online information-seekers astray. Instead of always going deeper, following arguments wherever they seem to lead, he suggests that internet users be taught to simplify: to check arguments quickly against mainstream sources, determine whether a given arguer is a plausible authority, and then move on if the person isn’t.

I’m pretty doubtful of the “reality czar” concept, but Caulfield’s arguments were more interesting.

More here.