Animals

At night a knot of sea-lions lies off the shore
In the slow swell between the rock and the cliff,
Sharp flippers lifted, or great-eyed heads, as they roll in the sea,
Bigger than draft horses, and barking like dogs
Their all-night song. It makes me wonder a little
That life near kin to human, intelligent, hot-blooded, idle and
… singing, can float at ease
In the ice-cold midwinter water. Then, yellow dawn
Colors the south, I think about the rapid and furious lives
… in the sun:
They have little to do with ours; they have nothing to do with
… oxygen and salted water; they would look monstrous
If we could see them : the beautiful passionate bodies of living
… flame, batlike flapping and screaming,
Tortured with burning lust and acute awareness, that ride the
… storm-tides
Of the great fire-globe. They are animals as we are. There are
… many other chemistries of animal life
Besides the slow oxidation of carbohydrates and amino-acids.

by Robinson Jeffers
from News of the Universe—
… Poems of Twofold Consciousness chosen by Robert Bly
Sierra Club Books, 1995

Samuel Moyn at Lit Hub:

It would take Tolstoy some time to sound the alarm that humanitarianism could entrench war. On the way to doing so, he had one of his most famous characters embrace the inverse proposition: brutality can make it rare.

“One thing I would do if I had the power,” Prince Andrei, the debonair and reflective leading man of War and Peace, declares, “I would not take prisoners.” It comes to the hero as an epiphany: if in battle an enemy soldier were captured, or if he laid down his arms and surrendered, it should not save him from death. No one today thinks it is permissible to kill enemies in war summarily when they are captured or surrender. In fact, to do so is today a gross war crime. How could Andrei take a position that would have made even the worst counselors of inhumanity in recent American wars—George W. Bush’s lawyers, who exempted the country precisely from rules about how to treat captives—blanch?

more here.

Yiyun Li at The Paris Review:

Books that I feel drawn to and reread, War and Peace among them, are full of uncommon sense and common nonsense. (Uncommon nonsense makes exhilarating literature, too, in Lewis Carroll’s case, but uncommon nonsense does better to stay uncommon: in less skillful hands, it becomes caprice or parody.)

One imagines that Tolstoy did not seek to write about uncommon sense. He simply presented the world, and the world, looked at closely, is often extraordinary. A line I never tire of in War and Peace: “The transparent sounds of hooves rang out on the planks of the bridge.”

Colors are regularly described as “muted” or “loud,” but sounds that are transparent make a reader pause. The ringing hooves take me back to my early childhood in Beijing, where cars were scarce, and flatbed horse trailers passed in the street, carrying coal, lumber, produce, and sometimes people huddled together.

more here.

Stan Carey in Sentence first:

It’s a truism that language is integral to identity. So when our relationship with it changes, complications quickly accrue: Do we become someone different in another tongue? Is that all down to culture and context, or is there something inherent in a language that affects who we feel ourselves to be? And what happens when we start our lives speaking one language but then switch to another?

These are among the questions explored, with heart and rigour, in Julie Sedivy’s new book, Memory Speaks: On Losing and Reclaiming Language and Self (available October 2021 from Harvard University Press, who sent me a copy). Sedivy was born in the former Czechoslovakia and spoke only Czech until the age of two. At that point her family left the country, then the continent, and her linguistic environment was transformed.

More here.

Max G. Levy in Quanta:

Imagine two friends hiking in the woods. They grow hungry and decide to split an apple, but half an apple feels meager. Then one of them remembers one of the strangest ideas she’s ever encountered. It’s a mathematical theorem involving infinity that makes it possible, at least in principle, to turn one apple into two.

That argument is called the Banach-Tarski paradox, after the mathematicians Stefan Banach and Alfred Tarski, who devised it in 1924. It proves that according to the fundamental rules of mathematics, it’s possible to split a solid three-dimensional ball into pieces that recombine to form two identical copies of the original. Two apples out of one.

“Right away, one sees that it’s completely counterintuitive,” said Dima Sinapova of the University of Illinois, Chicago.

More here.

Eric Schmidt in Project Syndicate:

The world is only starting to grapple with how profound the artificial-intelligence revolution will be. AI technologies will create waves of progress in critical infrastructure, commerce, transportation, health, education, financial markets, food production, and environmental sustainability. Successful adoption of AI will drive economies, reshape societies, and determine which countries set the rules for the coming century.

This AI opportunity coincides with a moment of strategic vulnerability. US President Joe Biden has said that America is in a “long-term strategic competition with China.” He is right. But it is not only the United States that is vulnerable; the entire democratic world is, too, because the AI revolution underpins the current contest of values between democracy and authoritarianism. We must prove that democracies can succeed in an era of technological revolution.

More here.

You can also watch Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5.

Alice Albinia in The Guardian:

Throughout history, the idea of islands where women rule has been part mythological wish fulfilment, part male fantasy – and part cultural-geographical reality. In 2017 I moved to Orkney, an archipelago still dominated, as all of Britain once was, by its monumental neolithic architecture. Early one spring morning I visited the chambered cairn of Maeshowe, which is older than Stonehenge and much more complex in construction. Originally a circle of standing stones, around 2800BC it was encased in huge slabs of rock, making a domed chamber aligned to the setting winter solstice sun. Five thousand years later, on any clear evening a few weeks either side of solstice, as the sun goes down behind the hill of a nearby island, it hits the top of a standing stone, and is channelled into Maeshowe in a burst of golden light. It is a sacred moment in Britain’s year: when nature and culture collide, exploding out of winter’s darkness in a dramatic symbol of warmth and hope.

We were there to experiment with neolithic acoustics. Kristin Linklater, an Orcadian voice coach, crawled down Maeshowe’s entrance passage first, followed by me and my baby daughter, an archaeologist or two, musicians and students. Inside the central chamber, we stood up and began to sing. Kristin and I had already discussed our fascination with Maeshowe’s shape, which, with its green turf covering, looks like a giant grassy breast or pregnant womb. Together, we had enjoyed deploring the fact that the female symbolism of this monument receives little if any mention in academic literature, let alone tourist guidebooks. Yet it is just as likely that structures such as Maeshowe were designed to honour the female body as a safehouse of human potency in the world, as they were to serve a male elite priesthood.

More here.

Anne Applebaum in The Atlantic:

“It was no great distance, in those days, from the prison-door to the market-place. Measured by the prisoner’s experience, however, it might be reckoned a journey of some length.”

So begins the tale of Hester Prynne, as recounted in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s most famous novel, The Scarlet Letter. As readers of this classic American text know, the story begins after Hester gives birth to a child out of wedlock and refuses to name the father. As a result, she is sentenced to be mocked by a jeering crowd, undergoing “an agony from every footstep of those that thronged to see her, as if her heart had been flung into the street for them all to spurn and trample upon.” After that, she must wear a scarlet A—for adulterer—pinned to her dress for the rest of her life. On the outskirts of Boston, she lives in exile. No one will socialize with her—not even those who have quietly committed similar sins, among them the father of her child, the saintly village preacher. The scarlet letter has “the effect of a spell, taking her out of the ordinary relations with humanity, and enclosing her in a sphere by herself.”

We read that story with a certain self-satisfaction: Such an old-fashioned tale! Even Hawthorne sneered at the Puritans, with their “sad-colored garments and grey steeple-crowned hats,” their strict conformism, their narrow minds and their hypocrisy. And today we are not just hip and modern; we live in a land governed by the rule of law; we have procedures designed to prevent the meting-out of unfair punishment. Scarlet letters are a thing of the past.

More here.

William Hasselberger at The New Atlantis:

To be even remotely plausible, a computer model of the human mind must warp — and restrict — our commonsense definitions of intelligence, knowledge, understanding, and action. Larson discusses the renowned computer scientist Stuart Russell, who defines intelligence as simply the efficient pursuit of objectives, based on inputs from the environment. An “intelligent agent,” says Russell, is just a physical “process” whereby a “stream of perceptual inputs is turned into a stream of actions” to achieve a predefined “objective.” As Larson wryly notes, this definition “covers everything from Einstein ‘achieving’ his ‘objective’ when he reimagined physics as relativity, to a daisy turning its face toward the sun.” It places intelligent human activity on the same spectrum as Venus fly traps and shrimp; the difference is merely a matter of complexity.

Among other things, this ignores the reflective aspect of human intelligence — how we discover, imagine, question, and commit to our objectives in the first place, the judgments we make about which objectives really matter in life, and which are trivialities, distractions, irrational cravings.

more here.

Gary Dorrien at Commonweal:

“We never said the welfare state is a substitute for socialism.” This staple of Harrington’s lecture tours had a flipside, his retort to old-school socialists: “Any idiot can nationalize a bank.” He said both things frequently after Mitterrand retreated. Harrington relied on his core message: bureaucratic collectivism is an unavoidable reality. The question is whether it can be wrested into a democratic and ethically decent form. Freedom will survive the ascendance of globalized markets and corporations only if it achieves economic democracy. Harrington had long argued that the market should operate within a plan, but in the mid-1980s his actual position shifted to the opposite. He conceived planning within a market framework on the model of Swedish and German social democracy—solidarity wages, full employment, co-determination, and collective worker funds. To many critics that smacked of selling out socialism. He replied: “To think that ‘socialization’ is a panacea is to ignore the socialist history of the twentieth century, including the experience of France under Mitterrand. I am for worker- and community-controlled ownership and for an immediate and practical program for full employment which approximates as much of that ideal as possible. No more. No less.”

more here.

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

The Priest’s Son

these five hills
are the five demons
that Khandoba killed

says the priest’s son
a young boy
who come along as your guide
as the schools have vacations

do you really believe that story
you ask him

he doesn’t reply
but merely looks uncomfortable
shrugs and looks away

and happens to notice
a quick wink of a movement
in the scanty patch of scruffy dry grass
burnt brown in the sun
as says

look
there’s a butterfly
there

The Butterfly

There is no story behind it.
It is split like a second.
It hinges around itself.

It has no future.
It is pinned down to no past.
It’s a pun on the present.

It’s a little yellow butterfly.
It has taken these wretched hills
under its wings.

Just a pinch of yellow,
it opens before it closes
and closes before it o

where is it

by Arun Kolatkar
from Jejuri
New York Review Books, 2005

Joshua Briscoe in The New Atlantis:

In April, the New York Times published a news article that was essentially an advertisement for physician-assisted suicide. “It’s less a question of uncontrollable physical pain,” the article explained. Rather, most patients who want doctors to help them end their lives feel they have lost autonomy, dignity, and quality of life, and are unable to “engage in what makes people’s lives meaningful.” And this type of “intractable” pain is “defined by patients, not doctors.” More state laws, so the reasoning goes, should come to allow these patients’ autonomous choice.

But what proponents of this view persistently fail to see is its double-edged nature. A patient’s choice to end her life is not “defined” by her, if by that we mean that it is a choice that is just about herself. Rather, it is a declaration about what kind of life is worth living. It is thus also a statement about other people’s lives, a statement to others about when their own lives are worth living or not.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

Physics is extremely good at describing simple systems with relatively few moving parts. Sadly, the world is not like that; many phenomena of interest are complex, with multiple interacting parts and interesting things happening at multiple scales of length and time. One area where the techniques of physics overlap with the multi-scale property of complex systems is in the study of phase transitions, when a composite system transitions from one phase to another. Nigel Goldenfeld has made important contributions to the study of phase transitions in their own right (and mathematical techniques for dealing with them), and has also been successful at leveraging that understanding to study biological systems, from the genetic code to the tree of life.

More here.

Salar Abdoh and Mohammad Hossein Jafarian in Guernica:

Salar Abdoh: I’ve read my share of books and articles over the years about Afghanistan and talked to people who spent stretches of time there, but it’s no exaggeration to say that I’ve never come across one person who has more in-the-field experience than you have about a land that few understand but many weigh in on, far too irresponsibly.

The thing that I want to first ask you about, the thing that I suppose has irked me as I listen to Western analyses of the debacle now brought on Afghanistan — the obscene withdrawal, the countless “assets” left behind to fend for themselves, and the general misery that Afghans faced before and will face now with a Taliban that has waited two decades to mete retribution — is this notion of “nation-building” that Americans always talk about. Both left- and right-leaning American politicians take for granted that, in fact, that is what America tried to do in Afghanistan. It’s the premise that everyone begins their conversation with. Do you think that America was ever really engaged in nation-building in Afghanistan?

Mohammad Hossein Jafarian: A false premise. Someone engages in building a nation who understands that nation – its people, what they eat, what they dream, how they walk through a door, what their aspirations are. Instead you go and pluck some guy, Ashraf Ghani, from the World Bank and install him there and imagine you are building a nation?

More here.

Speak

Now is the time to speak
Lips not be sealed
Body unbroken
Blood coursing still
Through your veins

Now is the time to speak
Look
The iron glows red
Like your blood
The chain lies open
Like your lips

Now is the time to speak

Speak
For truth and honor shall not wait

Speak
Say all that needs to be said today

by Anjum Altaf
from Trangressions, Poems Inspired by Faiz Ahmed Faiz
LG Publishers, Delhi,2019

Philip Ó Ceallaigh at the LARB:

JÓZEF CZAPSKI was a reserve officer in the Polish army when German and Soviet forces invaded his country in September 1939. His unit surrendered to the Soviets toward the end of that month. In “Memories of Starobielsk,” the 40-page essay that gives this collection, translated by Alissa Valles, its title, Czapski tells how he and his comrades were deceived by the promise that they would be sent through neutral territory to France, from where they could continue the fight against the Germans. Instead, they were marched eastward as prisoners of war, over the Soviet frontier:

A world apart. Ruined shabby houses, dilapidated, as if they’d never had any maintenance. As for the famous electrification you read so much about: every so often there was an electric lamp blinking a wan red light, and in the city park, Stalin’s profile in red neon — that was all.

more here.