Carlos Santana at Aeon Magazine:

You don’t need a degree in biology to see that invasive species occupy a peculiar moral position: they are the one part of nature we are told not to love. As a philosopher of science, my ears prick up whenever I notice moral complexities emerging among scientists. It makes me wonder: when it comes to invasive species, is the science shaping our moral attitudes or are those attitudes shaping the work of ecologists and conservationists?

The casting of ‘invasives’ as ecological villains has long been backed by scientific and political consensus. Yet as species increasingly move into unfamiliar regions, a favouritism towards natives is growing harder to defend. The traditional approach of trying to stop invasions and eradicate successful invaders isn’t just costly and often ineffective. It may be entirely the wrong approach, if we’re concerned about the environment. While some invasive species are truly harmful and need to be fought, others are a healthy ecological response – they’re part of how the biosphere is adapting to humanity’s environmental impact. If we want a science that responds honestly to planetary change, we need to address the deep biases against Burmese pythons, out-of-control weeds and other species on the move. We desperately need a new way of coexisting with the forms of life that are being rapidly redistributed on our changing planet.

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(Note: Throughout February, at least one post will be devoted to Black History Month: A century of Black History Commemorations)

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D. Graham Burnett at The Paris Review:

Many filmmakers, going back to some of the earliest experiments with the moving picture, have depicted the intensity of the gazes fixed on their own medium. One thinks of Dziga Vertov’s interwar metacinema, or even a vaudeville-steeped silent classic like D. W. Griffith’s Those Awful Hats (1909). It was something they thought about a lot, early cinematographers—the mesmeric power of their own images. And so it was a very alluring topic to explore.

But it is one thing to shoot an actor who has been told to make a face “as if” he is looking at a movie. It is another to put the camera in the movie screen itself, and then to play the movie and record the actual reaction. This is a much more recent technique. To be sure, shots of people seeing things in the world are a cinematic commonplace. But the majority of such imagery captures these reactions within the established triangle of subject, object, camera. It is much rarer for a filmmaker to close that triangle down into pure bilateral eyeline gaze: to film from the perspective of the thing being seen, where that thing is itself a moving image.

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Ege Yumusak in The Point:

The starkest, most disquieting scene from the film was printed on postcards and handed out at the door. We picked up our postcards as we hurried into the theater to secure our seats. My eyes widened: a group of women in burqas sat on a beach facing the ocean. Before them stood a woman with dark hair—uncovered—wearing a long, flowing white dress as she faced the women in the burqas. I began mentally preparing for the ideological and cultural translations—and mistranslations—I might be in for by the end of the movie, when we would inevitably run into acquaintances and friends in the foyer.

The director was privy to the provocations of her film, Leila and the Wolves. “This film offended everyone,” she proudly told the packed room at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, at a screening last spring. When the movie came out in the Eighties, everybody, including those on the left, could find something to be offended by in it. Her films were deemed insufficiently feminist for being full of guns, while at the same time criticized for “overemphasizing” women’s liberation in comparison to imperialism. Now her films could finally resume their provocations: since last spring, the “eighty-springs-young” director, Heiny Srour, has toured Europe, the U.K. and the U.S., screening new restorations of her masterpieces The Hour of Liberation Has Arrived (1974) and Leila and the Wolves (1984), thanks to programmers determined to bring her provocative socialist feminist oeuvre to wider audiences (a destiny all too rare in the history of Global South cinema). But this time around, especially in the West, she has found the political engagement with her work to be lacking. “In France, they shower me in praises,” Srour complained. Praise is boring. Trained as a sociologist, she wants her films to spark arguments.

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Shehryar Fazli in The Ideas Letter:

“The white cracker who wrote the national anthem knew what he was doing,” says the Black nurse Belize in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, set in the 1980s, “He set the word ‘free’ to a note so high no one can reach it.”

This statement may sound overly despairing to someone keen to reconcile America’s high principles to the daily experience of living in the nation, as Belize’s (white) interlocutor Louis is. Whatever the turpitudes of the Reagan administration, whatever the horrors of the AIDS epidemic, for Louis the nation has kept its holdings in the sacred honor that carried the Revolution, twenty years after the fulfillment of Black civil and political rights.

Belize’s line could have been the epigraph for the scholar Brandon M. Terry’s new book Shattered Dreams, Infinite Hope: A Tragic Vision of the Civil Rights Movement, a powerful dissent from the romantic view of American history in general and the civil rights movement in particular. He tests the mainstream historiography of that struggle as an exemplary political action whose success incorporated “the excluded into this healthy political sphere and the mainstream of social life.”

In the romantic vision of the movement, the 1950s and 60s saw civic struggle, court rulings, and legislation defeat white supremacy in a reckoning with the past that would place the US firmly ahead of the Soviets in moral terms. It would also authenticate the promise of the Constitution, which in 1787 was “meant to mark the start of a new era, in which the course of history might be made predictable and a government established that would be ruled not by accident and force but by reason and choice,” as historian Jill Lepore wrote in her book, These Truths.

So ingrained is the belief in the constitution’s reflection of a political ideal, high above the facts on the ground, that no less a learned liberal commentator than Ezra Klein was surprised, in a 2019 interview with Lepore, to learn that today’s Electoral College was a byproduct of slavery.

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Pankaj Mishra interviews Zhang Weiwei in Equator:

Pankaj Mishra: […] there’s very little coverage in the Western press of how people in China view these developments. Can you tell us something about that?

Zhang Weiwei: Indeed, the Chinese are watching all this drama closely and with fascination. I think many people feel Carney was a bit more courageous than his European counterparts in calling this so-called rules-based international order a kind of disguise that allows the West to benefit – the US more, Canada maybe less. Now Donald Trump has said: we don’t need this disguise. We can approach everything based on the darkest aspects of realpolitik.

People [in China] see very clearly that these are naked acts of imperialism, hegemonism and colonialism. We have a holistic perception of all this: the crisis in in Greenland, the genocide in Gaza, the low-intensity civil war in Minneapolis and elsewhere in the US. All these are, in fact, interrelated, and it reflects deep structural problems in the Western political system.

In 2006, I wrote a small piece for The New York Times, saying that the Chinese model will be far more attractive than the American model in the Global South. Because in our model, we focus on people-centred development. The US, on the other hand, orients its political structure to favour the super-rich, and to sustain that today, they’re going back to the roots of capitalism: exploitation and territory grabs. In 2018, I gave a talk at Harvard in which I said that China’s leadership was looking to the 2050s while Trump was looking to the 1950s. Now he’s looking to the 1850s, which is clear in the US security strategy report issued at the end of last year. I remember Jeffrey Sachs saying that it is not so much anti-Russia or anti-China, it’s anti-everyone – except, perhaps, Israel.

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(Note: Throughout February, at least one post will be devoted to Black History Month: A century of Black History Commemorations)

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(Note: Throughout February, at least one post will be devoted to Black History Month: A century of Black History Commemorations)

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Auren Hoffman at Summation:

Amazon knows everything you’ve ever bought. They could build an incredibly sophisticated profile of who you are and what you want and even what you need.

And their recommendations STILL haven’t improved since Bush (W.). yes, the last time Amazon really improved its recommendations was BEFORE the US invaded Iraq.

Instead, they just recommend more of what you just bought.

The same pattern plays out for everything: buy razors → here are 200 more razor options.

The fundamental assumption seems to be that people want to endlessly comparison shop the thing they just bought. Which is INSANE.

What we really want is delightful recommendations. We want to see products that we do not know about that would be good fits for us. This is very doable in the age of AI. but even mighty Amazon does not even try. They are completely out to lunch.

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Edward Chen in Nature:

Scientists report that a type of giant virus multiplies furiously by hijacking its host’s protein-making machinery¹ — long-sought experimental evidence that viruses can co-opt a system typically associated with cellular life.

The researchers found that the virus makes a complex of three proteins that takes over its host’s protein-production system, which then churns out viral proteins instead of the host’s own.

Virologists had already suspected that viruses could perform such a feat, says Frederik Schulz, a computational biologist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, who was not involved with the work. But the new findings, published in Cell on 17 February, are an important confirmation. Compared with other viruses, he says, this one “has a more powerful toolbox to really replace what the host is doing”.

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Dan Kagan-Kans at Transformer:

“Somehow all of the interesting energy for discussions about the long-range future of humanity is concentrated on the right,” wrote Joshua Achiam, head of mission alignment at OpenAI, on X last year. “The left has completely abdicated their role in this discussion. A decade from now this will be understood on the left to have been a generational mistake.”

It’s a provocative claim: that while many sectors of the world, from politics to business to labor, have begun engaging with what artificial intelligence might soon mean for humanity, the left has not. And it seems to be right.

As a movement, it appears the left has not been willing to engage seriously with AI — despite its potential to affect the lives and livelihoods of billions of people in ways that would normally make it just the kind of threat, and opportunity, left politics would concern itself with.

Instead, the left has, for a mix of reasons good and bad, convinced itself that AI is at the same time something to hate, to mock, and to ignore.

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Quick, Now, Always

We would like to linger here even longer,
especially when the sun lays gold
over lawns, some so white-fenced, idyllic, and sexy
they obsess us with what? —ourselves? —That recurring
wilderness within? All night the rain
gently sucking leaves till morning. And here
are the flowers that put out our eyes. We should throw
our bodies onto the earth, just as we throw

them onto each other. Reyes and I walked long,
talking of love in a place with no people. We could feel
its absence burning within. First at twilight
in the cow boneyard. Then next morning
beside the birthing pen. The way the heifer licked
the wet calf up, then mooed.

life into its bones. This, when nature is
only itself, when love is
sheer will. But still, the mother’s eyes bulging
toward the birth, and the mooing that goes down
into the glistening body, down into the soft hooves,
and down into the earth. This mooing
that goes on and on and will not stop, up to
the final sucking ass and carcass of death. This,

what we would, but lack. WE choose instead
such sheer reprehensible and pansexual
delights, vogueing us beyond our shirted longing,
incomprehensible despite. Quiet fools we move
and are moved by movings until staring
through the glass eyes of pleasure, we feel its palace
collapse. Oh how we long to feel that muscled
abandon for which there is no height,
an expanse whose taste is
salt, and whose hearing is all underwater,
all struggle, all breathing, one ocean, one
night. Everywhere now new leaves are ungluing their green
…… encased
with light. What we give changes us into something more
airy, something to last.

by Mark Irwin
from Quick, Now, Always
BOA Editions, 1996

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Alaina Morgan in Black Perspectives:

In 1963, famed American photographer Richard Avedon shot a set of rare portraits of Malcolm in which he appears unsmiling, facial features blurred, the rims of his iconic glasses just visible, and his eyes receding into the dark spaces around their sockets. He appears as a wisp – we know it is him, but only a faint impression of him is actually visible. Scholar Graeme Abernethy notes that the photograph is one of the few instances that we have which so starkly represents the malleability of Malcolm’s image. He writes that the photograph is “cryptic in its purposeful haze, skull-like in its coloration and concealment of Malcolm’s eyes in shadow, yet intimate in its perspective . . . [and therefore, it] seems to allude to the transubstantiation enabled by his death.” This malleability is possible because Malcolm’s life, with all of its possibility, was snuffed out as it began to shine the brightest.

More here.

(Note: Throughout February, at least one post will be devoted to Black History Month: A century of Black History Commemorations)

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From Jonathan Bate’s Literary Remains:

One of the most consequential misunderstandings in the history of literary criticism turns on a single Greek word. In Aristotle’s Poetics, that word is hamartia. It is usually rendered, in classrooms and handbooks, as “tragic flaw,” and on that translation an entire tradition of reading tragedy has been erected. Yet if we return to Aristotle’s Greek and trace the word’s history with some philological care, it becomes clear that this familiar formula rests on a slow but decisive mistranslation—less an error at a single moment than a long cultural drift in which a term meaning “mistake” gradually hardened into a doctrine of moral defect.

In classical Greek, hamartia belongs to the language of action rather than character. Its root sense is concrete and kinetic: to miss one’s mark, as an archer misses the target. By extension, it denotes an error, a misjudgment, a false step—often one made in ignorance of some crucial fact. Aristotle uses the term this way throughout his works, ethical and otherwise.

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