Sam Dembling at n+1:

Michael Hurley, the godfather of freak folk, died in April. Now we have his last, posthumous album, which was released in September and offers a final occasion to look back at his contributions, always arriving slightly aslant, to folk music history. An outsider artist but no museum-room oddity, Hurley was an authentic American avant-gardist, like Emily Dickinson or Ornette Coleman. When I saw him at the Brooklyn Folk Festival last November he walked onstage to a hero’s welcome. The show was in a great dark church and those of us who didn’t arrive in time to fill the pews found space on the floor, sitting at his feet. Skeletal, serious, with a handkerchief around his neck and a pipefitter hat shading his eyes, Hurley sang out in a tremulous voice. A few times in the set he paused for a moment—Had he forgotten the words? I wondered—but only to summon some invisible inner current. He was funny, he was grim. On one song, Snock, as many called him, resembled a children’s entertainer, doing an a cappella impersonation of an owl with utter frankness. On another, “The End of the Road,” a wry confrontation with final things, he seemed to be chilly elegizing himself: “They’re chasing’ the fox and they’re runnin’ him ragged and he knows he gone wrong somewhere.” He was old, but the music was electric and his fans seemed to be younger than ever.

more here.

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The Forest is Burning in the Palm of My Hand

My son comes running across acres of grass.
He is twenty-seven years old.
He is eleven years old. He is
four years old.

He turns his hand up to show me
the distant inner glow, smoke
drifting from him.

He wants to see so I lift
my hand to the old paths
where fire often danced;
plateaus of desolation inside my fist.

My son comes running
across acres of grass.
He is four
years old. He
is eleven years old.
He is twenty-seven
years old.

by Lou Lipsitz
from Seeking the Hook
Signal books, 1997

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Dana Milbank in The Washington Post:

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Dean W. Ball at Hyperdimensional:

Imagine that you are a cook, and you just made a cake in your kitchen. You’ve made a delicious cake, and you’d like to start a business making 1,000 of them a day. So you replicate your kitchen 1,000 times over—you buy 1,000 residential ovens, 1,000 standard mixing bowls, 1,000 bags of flour. And you hire 1,000 humans to follow your recipe, each making their own cake in the various kitchens you’ve built.

Of course no one would do this. And yet this is not that far off from how we today “scale science,” and in some ways we are even less efficient.

What you should do instead, obviously, is build a factory with the ability to make 1,000 cakes at the same time. This was, at one point, a new type of institution that entailed distinct organizational structures (the modern corporation, for example), new relationships of workers to firm owners, novel patterns of work, and much else. The factory enabled and necessitated new technology: in our example, industrial ovens, wholesale purchase of ingredients, and the like, in quantities that would be alien in a residential kitchen. Similarly, it required new occupations that do not map cleanly to their pre-industrial analogs (consider the “chef” or “baker,” for example, versus the “batter-vat cleaner”).

Standing in a pre-industrial residential kitchen, it would be difficult to imagine a factory, partially because there are numerous complementary innovations a factory requires (for example, the ability to manufacture and power industrial-scale cooking equipment), and partially because imagination is hard.

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Tessa Koumoundouros at Science Alert:

With their bladed paws, wielded by a rippling mass of pure muscle, sharp eyes, agile reflexes, and crushing fanged jaws, lions are certainly not a predator most animals have any interest in messing with. Especially seeing as they also have the smarts to hunt in packs.

“Lions are the biggest group-hunting land predator on the planet, and thus ought to be the scariest,” conservation biologist Michael Clinchy from Western University in Canada said in 2023.

But in over 10,000 recordings of wildlife on the African savannah, 95 percent of the species observed responded with far more terror to the sound of an entirely different beast. This animal isn’t even technically an apex predator. It’s us: humans.

More here.

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Hannah Ritchie at Sustainability by Numbers:

I often hear about “skyrocketing” demand for electricity in countries like the United States (here’s just one example).

There is no doubt that electricity demand will rise (or, in many countries, already has started rising). This is often a good thing as it represents a shift from fuels to electricity, which is another huge part of the energy transition.

There is a lot of hand-wringing about whether countries will be capable of meeting this extra demand. But that made me curious about how unprecedented this growth really is. How do current and future growth rates compare to the past? Is it really the case that electricity demand will “skyrocket”, or are we really just talking about a fairly quick increase?

Let’s run through some numbers for the US to get some perspective.

More here.

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Maria Popova at The Marginalian:

How you love, how you give, and how you suffer is just about the sum of who you are. What you make of your suffering is the abacus on which it all adds up. It is there that your capacities to love and to give contract or expand, there that you feel most alone, there that you touch most directly the thread of human experience that binds us. Suffering is the common record of our unreturned messages to hope, and because we are the hoping species, it is inseparable from what makes us human. More than a cerebral operation, it is an experience of the total organism, entwining synapse and sinew, engaging the entire orchestra of hormones and neurotransmitters and enzymes that plays the symphony of aliveness. This is why AIs — those disembodied cerebrators — will never know suffering and, not knowing the transmutation of suffering into meaning we call art, will never be able to write a truly great poem. (About suffering they will always be wrong, the new masters.)

Nick Cave — who has known more grief than most, having lost his young son and lost his own father at a young age, but has remained an unrelenting guardian of joy — takes up the question of that transmutation on the pages of his altogether magnificent book Faith, Hope and Carnage (public library).

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Philip Elliott in Time Magazine:

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Not About Anyone’s Hands

This poem is not about anyone’s hands
holding a book or a steering wheel or winding a clock
or steady as the dark beyond my headlights.

Trees sweep past. Houses are bulk and shadow
except for a light that shows where the kitchen is. People asleep
don’t hear sorrows piling, cumulous, behind the rotting barn.

Even the air has nothing in it. This poem is not
about neighbors, or what it means to stop at a house
because all the lights are on and that means someone’s sick.
Some people driving home know just what’s in the dark:

dogs, coyotes, cows that shift against other cow legs and rumps,
tails winding down like broken metronomes
|until even the horses are dreaming, uninterrupted green.
In this poem, the wife’s hands let go of everything. Autumn glides by

outside the frost-starred, shatter-starred windshield glass.
The driveway’s long. The husband stands, watching the stars
fall doubled into the pond. He doesn’t say anything.
He doesn’t see what her arms will carry. The dogs howl.

Some things are nobody’s fault. Get the broom out.
Think of it as a waltz, dance with it, and sweep.

JoLee G. Passerini
—from Rattle #26, Winter 2006

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Shelby Bradford in The Scientist:

As Halloween and other indulgent holidays come up on the calendars, people are likely to enjoy more sweet treats. But it won’t only be the individual enjoying that extra rush of sugar; the bacteria that call the human mouth home will also be responding to the additional candies and confectionary creations. So how does the oral microbiome respond to sugar?

“In the most worst possible ways,” answered Purnima Kumar, a clinician scientist and periodontist who studies the oral microbiome at University of Michigan. Kumar described a healthy, oral microbiome as a community that uses oxygen for its energy production. “Because it’s energy efficient it does not produce a lot of toxins or metabolic byproducts,” she said. “That’s what our immune system recognizes as health compatible and therefore literally lives in harmony with it or tolerates it.” In addition to regular brushing and flossing, Kumar said that diet has a large influence on the microbiome. Less processed foods, especially those high in fiber, are often less sticky, which decreases bacteria’s ability to adhere and overgrow at a surface.

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Hannah Zeavin at Bookforum:

A MAN LOOKS OVER A FENCE, SPYING. He notes the arrival of a Buick hardtop convertible. Parked now, the driver rolls the top down, using a new automatic mechanism, exposing the interior leather to the elements right at the wrong moment. The camera at first shows a magnificent three, who spill out as from a clown car: Jane Freilicher, Frank O’Hara, and John Ashbery. Then it lands on Jimmy Schuyler in the back, who, doubling as a porter, carries the luggage.

So begins Presenting Jane (1952), a short film made by Harrison Starr and John Latouche. The boy poets and their beloved woman painter have taken to Long Island; it is summer, and this exurb is, or would become, their haunt. It’s afternoon and time to get down to the water. John presses his palm against the supporting column of the porch, while Frank holds his column more tentatively and tenderly. They stare out on the sound, gazing at Jane, now in the landscape she prefers to paint. A glitch occurs, and like a ghost conjured through splice, Jimmy appears behind them once again.

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Anthony Gottlieb at Lit Hub:

In 1931, at the age of forty-one, Ludwig Wittgenstein mused in his diary that perhaps his name would live on only as the end point of Western philosophy—“like the name of the one who burnt down the library of Alexandria.” There probably was no such an arsonist. The books of ancient Alexandria seem to have perished mainly by rot and neglect, not in a single blaze.

And Western philosophy certainly did not come to an end with Wittgenstein, who died in 1951. He did not really believe that it would. Wittgenstein could get carried away when writing in his diaries, especially when contemplating himself, which he did often.

But he did think that he had found a fresh approach to philosophical problems. At least for a while and in some places, his influence changed how philosophy was done.

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Bruce Robbins at The Baffler:

Social Text still exists. In the spring of 1996, when the journal was the object of an enthusiastically publicized hoax by the physicist Alan Sokal, its survival seemed a bad bet. You published an essay arguing that gravity is a “social and linguistic construct?” Really? The mainstream media, hitherto unaware of the existence of this very little, very marginal magazine, were uncertain what exactly they were mocking. Was Social Text’s foolishness postmodern? Left wing? Cultural? Academic? They were certain, however, that what they smelled in the water was blood. On their side, and for a not insignificant portion of the left, jubilation. On the other side, humiliation. (I should know: I was the journal’s coeditor at the time.) We seemed like the stupidest people in the world, or the stupidest people who had been pretending to speak on behalf of the most avant-garde sociopolitical views. One friend of the journal suggested that we fall on our swords. If we owned no swords, swords could be made available.

The journal did not fold. One reason was that it had published a lot of good work, none of it remotely resembling Sokal’s gravity-is-a-construct nonsense, and those who cared about such things knew it.

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Ethan Mollick at One Useful Thing:

The four most advanced AI systems are Claude from Anthropic, Google’s Gemini, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and Grok by Elon Musk’s xAI. Then there are the open weights AI families, which are almost (but not quite) as good: Deepseek, Kimi, Z and Qwen from China, and Mistral from France. Together, variations on these AI models take up the first 35 spots in almost any rating system of AI. Any other AI service you use that offers a cutting-edge AI from Microsoft Copilot to Perplexity (both of which offer some free use) is powered by one or more of these nine AIs as its base.

How should you pick among them? Some free systems (like Gemini and Perplexity) do a good job with web search, while others cannot search the web at all. If you want free image creation, the best option is Gemini, with ChatGPT and Grok as runners-up. But, ultimately, these AIs differ in many small ways, including privacy policies, levels of access, capabilities, the approach they take to ethical issues, and “personality.” And all of these things fluctuate over time. So pick a model you like based on these factors and use it. However, if you are considering potentially upgrading to a paid account, I would suggest starting with the free accounts from Anthropic, Google, or OpenAI.

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