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John Yau at Hyperallergic:

Steve DiBenedetto, who began exhibiting in the 1980s, has become one of the best painters of his generation. A bundle of contradictions, restlessly moving between figuration and abstraction, he loves to push the paint around in his work — adding, scraping, changing — as he seeks links between the body and visionary states. The otherworldliness we encounter in his work is comic and unnerving, the perfect combination for these upside-down times.

The title of his current exhibition at Derek Eller, Spiral Architect, brings together two of his ongoing preoccupations — a line that winds around a center and the designer of a functional environment. Together, they underscore DiBenedetto’s conception of a painting as a search for a functional structure, a talisman that can aid viewers amid our collective sense of traumatic crisis. In contrast to artists such as Hilma af Klint and Forrest Bess, who believed they were conduits transmitting messages from a higher power, DiBenedetto wants to unlock the viewer’s own psychic unconsciousness and tap into the mind’s capacity for attaining visionary states. In this way, he is constantly reaching toward a cosmic sense of the absurd.

more here.

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Mark Higgins at Aeon Magazine:

Friedrich Nietzsche said a great deal about himself. He was the self-styled ‘Antichrist’, the herald of the ‘death of God’, a thinker who prided himself on disclosing the ‘human, all-too-human’ origins of morality, the soul and religious belief. He despised Platonism, regarded himself as history’s most formidable opponent of Christianity, and often wrote with a fiercely materialist agenda. Given these credentials, Nietzsche appears to be one of the least likely figures to merit the title ‘mystic’. But he was precisely that.

One reason it might seem odd to call Nietzsche a mystic is that he himself went to great lengths to oppose certain forms of mysticism. Nietzsche contrasted his relationship to mystical thought with that of his predecessor, the German pessimist Arthur Schopenhauer. Whereas Schopenhauer idolised the mystic as someone capable of intuiting the secret, inner oneness of all things, Nietzsche considered such a train of thought to be deeply pathological. To even countenance the possibility of a deeper, truer layer of reality beyond appearances – as Schopenhauer did – is to deny the value of this world in favour of something imaginary.

more here.

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Bud Smith in The Baffler:

We came in just before sunup and heard the plastic plant had to be shut down for emergency repair. The foreman drove us to the control house and then went in to talk specifics with the unit operator. We three mechanics remained in the work truck, cellphones lighting up our faces.

One of the guys was watching a video with the sound at a whisper. The other was scrolling. I pecked away at my phone, rewriting by memory a scene from my novel on my Notes app. Even though the book was out on submission, I was trying to make it better. Sometimes one of the guys would ask me who I was sending so many texts to, and I’d say, “My baby mama.” That was easier than explaining that during every hold point on the construction site, I didn’t want to do anything but work on my make-believe.

I’d written about three hundred words when the foreman opened the truck door and said it was the same ol’. We’d pop open the reactor manways after coffee break. I’d worked in this plant about fifteen years by then and had gone inside the polypropylene reactor thirty-something times to clean it out and repair whatever. This outage would be some variation on all those before it with just one thing for sure: heavy labor, the heaviest we knew.

More here.

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Shelly Fan in Singularity Hub:

A single shot transforms the mice’s brains into biomanufacturing machines. Blood proteins churn the injected chemicals into a soft, flexible electrode mesh that seamlessly wraps around delicate neurons. Pulses of light aimed at the mesh quiet hyperactive cells. All the while, the mice go about their merry ways, with no inkling they’ve been turned into cyborgs.

This science fiction-like invention is the brainchild of Purdue University scientists seeking to reimagine brain implants. These devices, often composed of rigid microelectrode chips, have already changed lives. They can collect electrical signals from the brain or spinal cord and translate these signals into speech or movement—returning lost abilities to people with paralysis or diseases of the brain. Implants can also jolt brain activity and pull people out of severe depression.

More here.

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Stone

Go inside a stone
That would be my way.
Let somebody else become a dove
Or gnash with a tiger’s tooth.
I am happy to be a stone.

From the outside the stone is a riddle:
No one knows how to answer it.
Yet within, it must be cool and quiet
Even though a cow steps on it full weight,
Even though a child throws it in a river;
The stone sinks, slow, unperturbed
To the river bottom
Where the fishes come to knock on it
And listen.

I have seen sparks fly out
When two stones are rubbed,
So perhaps it is not dark inside after all;
Perhaps there is a moon shining
From somewhere, as though behind a hill—
Just enough light to make out
The strange writings, the star-charts
On the inner walls.

by Charles Simic

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Matthew M. Davis at Quillette:

Copilot seemed to follow my train of thought. I say “seemed” because I know the received opinion is that AI bots don’t have thoughts of their own and can’t really “follow” other people’s thoughts either: they just regurgitate information and predict the next word based on words they were trained on. Snicker at my naïveté if you will; I felt that Copilot was doing more than that.

It seemed to “remember” my ideas, just as it “remembered” the stories my student had given it. It could give me my ideas back in different words, and make connections among them. When I added new ideas, Copilot seemed able to take them on board and link them to things I’d already said before I could point out such connections. The “conversation” we had progressed and deepened in the way a good human-talking-to-human conversation does.

I was impressed. Copilot was doing things I had assumed generative AI bots couldn’t do.

More here.

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Chris Insana at Noema:

Last October, Orpheus opened up a lottery, from which 10 people would be selected to beta test the Lazarus app. In the first twenty-four hours, they received more than 12,000 applications. Twelve thousand essays from grieving parents, spouses, and children, all hoping to be one of the lucky ones selected to get to talk again to the people that they lost. On November 1, 10 people were selected at random, each one assigned to a development team.

Jennifer Strong was a single mother who had lost her 13-year-old daughter, Claire, to leukemia 18 months earlier. After receiving word that she was one of the 10 people selected, she sent in her daughter’s computer, cell phone, journals, hundreds of pictures, and anything else she could find. Amy and her team spent a month compiling everything they received and recreating her daughter’s entire personality. Then, they sent her the Lazarus app to download on her phone and her computer, allowing her to talk to her daughter again.

More here.

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From The Conversation:

On February 28, the US and Israel launched a war against Iran following weeks of US military build-up in the region and threats from US President Donald Trump.

In the ensuing weeks, Iran has retaliated by striking US assets in the Persian Gulf states and targets across Israel. Israel has launched a ground invasion into southern Lebanon in response to attacks from Hezbollah.

Oil and gas shipments through the Strait of Hormuz have come to a virtual standstill, threatening a global energy crisis. And thousands have been killed, most in Iran and Lebanon.

The entire Middle East has been affected by this war – and the region will no doubt be very different once it’s resolved.

We asked five experts in international politics and Middle East studies to explain the most important changes they see happening following the war.

More here.

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Jensen Suthur at nonsite:

The first thing to note is that I whole-heartedly affirm Michaels’ now-classic claim that intentionality is constitutive of believing, acting, and therefore reading. Given the force of this claim, “Against Theory” should have been an object-lesson in swamp-draining, but in my view, its own quietism worked against its actual assimilation within literary studies. One way to put the problem is that Michaels is right to think that intentionality is descriptive of action and belief but wrong to think that it therefore has no normative role to play in the exercise of our agency.

For example, to be a friend is to be minimally abiding by the norms of friendship—versus, say, the norms of professional acquaintanceship. I thereby commit myself to doing certain things (showing up in times of need, lending a sympathetic ear, and so on) and not doing others (telling lies, being unreliable). But friendship can be pursued either well or poorly. A bad friend is not simply not-a-friend (a stranger) but someone who is committed to friendship and yet who is not making good on the commitment. Perhaps my friend compulsively lies, or borrows money and refuses to pay it back.

more here.

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David Ignatius in The Washington Post:

“There you have it, the meeting went well,” declared the Great Narrator a few hours after Saturday’s marathon, 21-hour negotiation with Iran ended. “Most points were agreed to, but the only point that really mattered, NUCLEAR, was not.” So — wham! — President Donald Trump announced that to get a better deal he was blockading the Strait of Hormuz. Some commentators speculated that with the failure to reach a deal in Islamabad, the United States might be marching deeper into another “forever” war — that the talks could have been a prelude to a new and perhaps more dangerous phase of conflict.

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Edward Chen in Nature:

A woman with an ultra-rare combination of three autoimmune diseases has had no symptoms since receiving a single dose of engineered immune cells, doctors in Germany report today¹. She had previously received nine other types of treatment without getting better, could no longer work and was sometimes bedridden for weeks with pain and fatigue. “Her disease got completely out of hand” and became “very life-threatening”, says Fabian Müller, a haematologist at University Hospital Erlangen in Germany who helped to treat her and co-authored the report.

Without the engineered cells, the woman, who was 47 when she met Müller and his colleagues, would have had a “terrible” quality of life, says Carl June, an immunologist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia who pioneered the use of similar cells to treat cancer, “if she would even be alive”.

More here.

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Richard Norton-Taylor at Literary Review:

It may be thought that the notorious Cambridge spies – the majority of them members of the Apostles, that university’s secretive, elitist society – had been written out. But, as Stalin’s Apostles makes clear, such is not the case. Most of the books on what the KGB later called their ‘Magnificent Five’ – Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross – have dwelt on their early lives, how they were recruited by Soviet talent spotters and through their individual networks, and how they were allowed to spy, undetected, for so long. Antonia Senior’s message in this carefully researched and well-written book, rich in anecdotes and insights, is indicated by the subtitle. Senior, a former student of Christopher Andrew, the pioneering Cambridge historian of Britain’s security and intelligence agencies, concentrates on the lasting damage that the Cambridge spies inflicted by providing Stalin with crucial information about the Western allies’ strategy and priorities (as well as the development of the atom bomb) when it was becoming evident Germany was losing the war.

Churchill and Roosevelt sold the pass at their Yalta summit in February 1945 by accepting that eastern and central Europe would come under Soviet political control.

more here.

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Serge Halimi in Sidecar:

In the aftermath of the French municipal elections last month, only one left-wing party registered concern at a poor result: the embattled Écologistes, who forfeited six of the eight large cities they claimed in the 2020 ‘Green wave’, including Bordeaux. Not for the first time, La France insoumise (LFI) offered a triumphalist reading – ‘remarkable’, a ‘groundswell’ – of a performance that fell short of most expectations. The Parti socialiste (PS), after pointing out that together with allies it still retained seven of France’s ten largest cities – Paris, Lyon and Marseille among them – resumed its perennial internal squabbles over responsibility for those it had lost (Brest, Clermont-Ferrand, Avignon). As for the Parti communiste français (PCF), it bagged Nîmes but saw an erosion of support in working-class strongholds like Vénissieux. The election of its national secretary, Fabien Roussel, as mayor of Saint-Amand-les-Eaux (16,000 inhabitants) chiefly served to cement his candidacy in next year’s presidential race.

Local contests are, it should be said, an unreliable guide to national outcomes. Three years after his capture of the Élysée in 2017, Emmanuel Macron failed to establish a foothold in municipalities large or small; he was nevertheless re-elected two years later.

More here.

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Henry Farrell over at his substack, Programmable Mutter:

Towards the end of his new book, The Irrational Decision, Ben Recht explains what he has set out to do.

Most books on technology either take the side that all technology is bad, or all technology is good. This isn’t one of those books. Such books focus too much on harms and not enough on limits. Limits are more empowering. Throughout the book, I’ve maintained that mathematical rationality is limited in what kinds of problems it is best placed to solve but has sweet spots that have yielded remarkable technological advances.

It may be that more books on technology escape the good-bad dichotomy than Ben allows. Even so, I haven’t read another book that is nearly as useful in explaining why and where the broad family of approaches that we (perhaps unfortunately) call AI work, and why and where they don’t. Ben (who is a mate) combines a deep understanding of the technologies with a grasp of the history and ability to write clearly and well about complicated things. I learned a lot from this book. Very likely, you will too.

The good-bad dichotomy that Ben describes does indeed shape a whole lot of our current debate around “mathematical rationality” and AI.

More here.

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Mona Ali in Equator:

The closure of a strategic waterway by a besieged nation ranks among the rarest and most consequential events in the history of the global economy. It has happened only twice in the postwar era. In 1956, Egypt closed the Suez Canal for five months – an act that broke Britain’s imperial currency and inaugurated the petrodollar age. It demonstrated for the first time that a small country could inflict serious damage on the economic order that had subjugated it. Now Iran has effectively blockaded the Strait of Hormuz, through which a quarter of the world’s seaborne oil passes. The question is whether this crisis heralds the end of American hegemony – and marks the beginning of the struggle over who or what will replace it.

The US-Israeli war on Iran has stranded more than 3000 vessels in the Persian Gulf and left the world short of over eleven million barrels of oil a day. Entire hydrocarbon-based supply chains have been disrupted: not just oil and gas exports but also supplies of urea used in fertiliser, helium for semiconductors and sulphur for defence equipment. Having long suffered under Western sanctions, Iran is now deploying the economic weapon itself.

The effects are ruinous and cascading.

More here.

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