Katherine Eban in Vanity Fair:

Gilles Demaneuf is a data scientist with the Bank of New Zealand in Auckland. He was diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome ten years ago, and believes it gives him a professional advantage. “I’m very good at finding patterns in data, when other people see nothing,” he says.

Early last spring, as cities worldwide were shutting down to halt the spread of COVID-19, Demaneuf, 52, began reading up on the origins of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes the disease. The prevailing theory was that it had jumped from bats to some other species before making the leap to humans at a market in China, where some of the earliest cases appeared in late 2019. The Huanan wholesale market, in the city of Wuhan, is a complex of markets selling seafood, meat, fruit, and vegetables. A handful of vendors sold live wild animals—a possible source of the virus.

That wasn’t the only theory, though. Wuhan is also home to China’s foremost coronavirus research laboratory, housing one of the world’s largest collections of bat samples and bat-virus strains.

More here.

Mallika Kaur in Guernica:

Thirty years have passed since journalists were cut off from Punjab, and Punjab from the world. In June of each year, Sikhs throng to gurudwaras to observe one of the most significant of their religious holidays. On this day, when even the less observant find their way to gurudwaras, the Indian Army attacked Darbar Sahib—the Golden Temple, the Sikh Vatican —and dozens of other gurudwaras across the state.

An estimated ten thousand never returned to claim their shoes from the entrance to the Darbar Sahib. That the exact number of civilian casualties remains unknown signifies precisely why June 1984 is relevant today. More so, in light of India’s May 2014 election and the fierce debates it raised about the status of India’s minority communities.

The army’s operation, code named “Blue Star,” began with the forced eviction of all foreign journalists from Punjab. This, coupled with a state-wide curfew enforced by soldiers, limited the documentation of the civilian experience. However, the people’s memory of these events has been preserved successfully.

More here.

George Packer in The Atlantic:

Nations, like individuals, tell stories in order to understand what they are, where they come from, and what they want to be. National narratives, like personal ones, are prone to sentimentality, grievance, pride, shame, self-blindness. There is never just one—they compete and constantly change. The most durable narratives are not the ones that stand up best to fact-checking. They’re the ones that address our deepest needs and desires. Americans know by now that democracy depends on a baseline of shared reality—when facts become fungible, we’re lost. But just as no one can live a happy and productive life in nonstop self-criticism, nations require more than facts—they need stories that convey a moral identity. The long gaze in the mirror has to end in self-respect or it will swallow us up.

Tracing the evolution of these narratives can tell you something about a nation’s possibilities for change. Through much of the 20th century, the two political parties had clear identities and told distinct stories. The Republicans spoke for those who wanted to get ahead, and the Democrats spoke for those who wanted a fair shake. Republicans emphasized individual enterprise, and Democrats emphasized social solidarity, eventually including Black people and abandoning the party’s commitment to Jim Crow. But, unlike today, the two parties were arguing over the same recognizable country. This arrangement held until the late ’60s—still within living memory.

More here.

Alan Burdick in The New York Times:

In a recent study, Dr. Deroy and her neuroscientist colleagues set out to understand why that is. The researchers paired human subjects with unseen partners, sometimes human and sometimes A.I.; each pair then played one in an array of classic economic games — Trust, Prisoner’s Dilemma, Chicken and Stag Hunt, as well as one they created called Reciprocity — designed to gauge and reward cooperativeness.

Our lack of reciprocity toward A.I. is commonly assumed to reflect a lack of trust. It’s hyper-rational and unfeeling, after all, surely just out for itself, unlikely to cooperate, so why should we? Dr. Deroy and her colleagues reached a different and perhaps less comforting conclusion. Their study found that people were less likely to cooperate with a bot even when the bot was keen to cooperate. It’s not that we don’t trust the bot, it’s that we do: The bot is guaranteed benevolent, a capital-S sucker, so we exploit it. That conclusion was borne out by reports afterward from the study’s participants. “Not only did they tend to not reciprocate the cooperative intentions of the artificial agents,” Dr. Deroy said, “but when they basically betrayed the trust of the bot, they didn’t report guilt, whereas with humans they did.” She added, “You can just ignore the bot and there is no feeling that you have broken any mutual obligation.”

This could have real-world implications. When we think about A.I., we tend to think about the Alexas and Siris of our future world, with whom we might form some sort of faux-intimate relationship. But most of our interactions will be one-time, often wordless encounters. Imagine driving on the highway, and a car wants to merge in front of you. If you notice that the car is driverless, you’ll be far less likely to let it in. And if the A.I. doesn’t account for your bad behavior, an accident could ensue.

More here.

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

The song comes over me like a wheatfield. my face
…… brushed by golden stalks

My spirit moves forth 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 of 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 of the inquiring,
……efficient blood, returning to its 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
……for 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 Seeking the Hook
Signal Books, 1997

Justin E. H. Smith in his Substack Newsletter:

In a speech to the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers in Moscow in 1934, Central Committee secretary Andreï Zhdanov reminded those assembled of Comrade Stalin’s recent declaration that, in the Soviet Union, writers are now “the engineers of the human soul”.

What obligations does this appellation entail? Most importantly, Zhdanov says, reality must be depicted “neither ‘scholastically’ nor lifelessly, nor simply as ‘objective reality’, but rather as reality in its revolutionary development. The truthfulness and historical exactitude of the artistic image must be linked with the task of ideological transformation, of the education of the working people in the spirit of socialism. This method in fiction and literary criticism is what we call the method of socialist realism.”

Literature in this vein “is a fundamentally optimistic literature, since it is the literature of the rising proletarian class, today the only progressive and advanced class. Our Soviet literature is strong because it serves a new cause — the cause of socialist construction.” Literature from the bourgeois imperialist nations, by contrast —excluding that small number of Western authors who had thrown in their lot with the global proletariat, a handful of whom were in attendance at the All-Union Congress— is, Zhdanov thinks, “a riot of mysticism, religious mania and pornography… characteristic of the decline and decay of bourgeois culture. The ‘celebrities’ of that bourgeois literature which has sold its pen to capital are today thieves, detectives, prostitutes, pimps and gangsters.”

More here.

Mordechai Rorvig in Quanta:

In the 1950s, four decades before he won a Nobel Prize for his contributions to game theory and his story inspired the book and film “A Beautiful Mind,” the mathematician John Nash proved one of the most remarkable results in all of geometry. Among other features, it implied that you could crumple a sphere down to a ball of any size without ever creasing it. He made this possible by inventing a new type of geometric object called an “embedding,” which situates a shape inside a larger space — not unlike fitting a two-dimensional poster into a three-dimensional tube.

There are lots of ways of embedding a shape. Some preserve the shape’s natural form — like rolling the poster into a cylinder — while others crease or tear it to make it fit in different ways.

Nash’s technique unexpectedly involved adding twists to all of a shape’s curves, making its structure springy and its surface ruffled. He proved that if you added infinitely many such twists, you could crumple the sphere down to a tiny ball. The result shocked mathematicians who previously had thought that crisp folds were required to crumple the sphere in this way.

Since then, mathematicians have sought to gain a precise understanding of the limits of Nash’s pioneering techniques.

More here.

Fabienne Lang in Interesting Engineering:

On June 2 ,Bill Gates’ advanced nuclear reactor company TerraPower, and Warren Buffett’s PacifiCorp announced that they’ve chosen Wyoming as the state to launch their Natrium advanced nuclear reactor project.

Small, modular advanced nuclear reactors run on different fuels than traditional reactors, and the hope is that they will help lower carbon emissions all while supporting intermittent power sources like wind and solar, ultimately helping to curb climate change, reported Reuters.

As Chris Levesque, president and CEO of TerraPower, said “The Natrium technology was designed to solve a challenge utilities face as they work to enhance grid reliability and stability while meeting decarbonization and emissions-reduction goals.”

The precise site of the Natrium reactor demonstration plant has yet to be decided, but the team expects to have found a site by the end of the year.

More here.

Benjamin Moser in Urubuquaquá:

Five years ago this month, I attended the Palestine Festival of Literature, an initiative of the Egyptian writer Ahdaf Souief. She is one of the people I admire the most in this world—a kind woman, a wonderful writer, and someone who has found a way to do something many artists wish we could do, or wish we could do better: make some impact in the “real world,” which is to say: in real people’s lives.

Because here’s the thing. Compared to the real world of banks and armies and governments, your little novel, your evocative sculpture, your lachrymose ballad, will never really feel that important.

It’s true that we do these things because, in a way we can’t quite articulate, we feel that books and paintings and songs are more important than banks or armies or governments: that in some mysterious way, art and ideas move the world. We believe this, but it always feels grandiose, since the results are so hard to see.

I don’t know any writer who has devoted as much of her time and energy to activism as Ahdaf has. At PalFest, international writers—mainly from the English-speaking world—come together with Palestinian and Arab writers. That could happen in Lyon or Berkeley or Milan or, these days, on Zoom. But what’s unique about PalFest is that it shows you the situation. And the situation is very hard to see, even for people who want to.

More here.

Adam Bradley in The New York Times:

I first saw Ralph Ellison when I was 19 years old and he had already passed away. On a summer evening in 1994, he appeared to me in the attic of an old manor house on the campus of a small college in the Pacific Northwest. I had encountered him — just as I had Langston Hughes and Jane Austen and Geoffrey Chaucer — by more conventional means the year prior, as an attentive reader of his published work. I read Ellison’s 1952 novel, “Invisible Man,” for the first time as part of a class on African American literature and was drawn to his wise-foolish protagonist with whom, looking back now, I shared more than a passing resemblance: a young Black college student with vague aspirations for leadership who stumbles upon writing as a means of illuminating his identity. Nonetheless, Ellison — like Hughes and Austen and Chaucer — remained intangible to me, aloof, distanced both by time and by achievement.

That could have been the end of it. But, as Ellison was fond of saying, “it’s a crazy country” — by which he meant that the diversity of the American experience often occasions unexpected confluences of people and circumstance. Soon after Ellison’s death, on April 16, 1994, at the age of 80, or perhaps 81 (evidence uncovered after his passing suggests he was born in 1913, not 1914, as he always claimed), Ellison’s wife, Fanny, called on their longtime friend John F. Callahan, my professor, to assume the literary executorship of his estate. Callahan asked me to be his assistant — to help him gather research, photocopy documents and sort materials — which explains why I ended up carrying shipments arriving from the Ellisons’ Riverside Drive address up a creaky staircase to the manor house attic on my college campus. My first task was to unpack the boxes and array the pages contained within across a long mahogany conference table, preparing them for Callahan’s inspection. Among the papers were drafts of Ellison’s unpublished second novel, around 40 years in progress; dot-matrix printouts from his computer, some with penciled edits; and handwritten notes scrawled on scraps of paper and on the backs of used envelopes.

More here.

Christina Pazzanese in The Harvard Gazette:

Coming from a long line of Hindu intellectuals and teachers, Amartya Sen enjoyed advantages and freedoms that few others did in a deeply-stratified India of the 1930s, during the waning days of the British empire. Teaching was in his blood, and from an early age, Sen was struck by the stark economic inequities he saw all around him under the British raj. Identifying and understanding the causes and effects that inequalities, like those surrounding poverty or gender, had on people’s lives would become a lifelong intellectual lodestar for the political economist, moral philosopher, and social theorist. Many economists focus on explaining and predicting what is happening in the world. But Sen, considered the key figure at the convergence of economics and philosophy, turned his attention instead to what the reality should be and why we fall short. “I think he’s the greatest living figure in normative economics, which asks not ‘What do we see?’ but ‘What should we aspire to?’ and ‘How do we even work out what we should aspire to?’” said Eric S. Maskin ’72, Ph.D. ’76, Adams University Professor and professor of economics and mathematics.

Over his 65-year career, Sen’s research and ideas have touched many areas of the field. He’s credited as one of the founding fathers of modern social-choice theory with his landmark 1970 book, “Collective Choice and Social Welfare.” The book took up the late Harvard economist Kenneth Arrow’s ideas from the early 1950s about how to combine different individuals’ well-being into a measure of social well-being, intensifying interest in and expanding upon Arrow’s work.

“It was really Amartya who made the field what it became,” said Maskin, a 2007 Nobel laureate in economics who has taught with Sen, the Thomas W. Lamont University Professor and professor of economics and philosophy, since the 1990s.

Sen’s 1970 paper, “The Impossibility of a Paretian Liberal,” was deeply influential on philosophy and economics. In it, he pointed to an inherent conflict between individual liberty and the principle that making people better off is always desirable.

More here. (Note: Thanks to Iqbal Riza)

Priyamvada Natarajan in The New York Review of Books:

The physicist Richard Feynman, in a lecture to undergraduates at the California Institute of Technology in 1961, posed a question and then answered it:

If, in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generations of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words? I believe it is the atomic hypothesis (or the atomic fact, or whatever you wish to call it) that all things are made of atoms.

The profound insight that the entire material world can be described succinctly as composed of fundamental building blocks is at the foundation of all theories about the nature of matter, from ancient inquiries into its properties, to medieval and early modern attempts to transmute base metals into precious gold, to modern efforts to understand atomic structure, harness the power of the atom with fission and fusion, and create artificial materials in laboratories.

Three new books examine our current understanding of matter’s origin and qualities, and chronicle our continuing quest to probe beyond atoms. Neutron Stars: The Quest to Understand the Zombies of the Cosmos by Katia Moskvitch, a science writer, explores recent research into the super-dense remains of stars ten times more massive than our Sun, whose precise material composition has eluded us. The astrophysicist Katie Mack’s The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking) shows how the contents of our universe—matter and energy—determine its destiny and, ultimately, its demise. In Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality, the physicist Frank Wilczek, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2004, addresses new discoveries that are leading to a reassessment of the atomic hypothesis. He explains how notions of matter have changed over the past decades from “all things are made of atoms” to “all things are made of elementary particles”—the expanding list of which includes quarks, gluons, muons, and the recently discovered Higgs boson.

More here.

Ben Bakkum in Macro Chronicles:

I wrote last month about how base effects would cause year-over-year inflation numbers in the US to appear to rocket higher, and the headline Consumer Price Index (CPI) print of 4.2% for April certainly got everyone’s attention. Not just base effects, however, drove the year-over-year figure that high, with large jumps in certain components such as used cars making historic contributions to the overall index change. We can easily foresee when the base effects will fall off, but knowing to what extent inflation will return to a lower clip when various transitory factors abate (as the Fed assures us) or if it can maintain a high rate on the back of significant fiscal and monetary stimulus (as certain economists, bitcoin boosters, and financial pundits warn), remains uncertain.

In a super complex system like the economy, forecasting variables such as inflation with precision can be a quixotic undertaking in relatively normal conditions, let alone in the wild circumstances shaped by the pandemic. I tend to fade—based I think on good reason—the calls made with complete conviction that a bout of soaring inflation will soon overtake us, but I think the most intellectually honest view involves acknowledging that inflation could very well stay high for longer than expected. I would argue that no one really knows for sure. I like the title of Emily Stewart’s recent piece at Vox, The Black Box Economy, as a name for the current state of the world that makes it tough to see what comes next.

As an example of why I think inflation will prove particularly unpredictable, a look under the hood of the consumer price index shows a striking increase in the dispersion of its various component indices around the shutdowns last year and the reopenings now. This means that whereas price changes for different things like bread, men’s sweaters, car tires, and veterinary services tended to maintain a fairly consistent distribution pre-pandemic, now the changes in components are veering off from each other in direction and magnitude.

More here.

Claudia Sahm in Bloomberg:

Concern that something is holding back U.S. workers from taking jobs along with anecdotes from employers having trouble hiring has accelerated a trend among state governors to end federal enhancements to jobless benefits this month — three months earlier than Congress intended. The goal is to get people off government benefits and back to work. It’s doubtful this policy change alone will be enough to meet employers’ hiring needs.

Some 7.6 million fewer people were employed in April than February 2020. But even with about 130 million Americans fully vaccinated, the number of workers is unlikely to rise rapidly. Government data show that only 1.4 million are on temporary layoff, down from the almost 17 million in the early months of the pandemic last year and a small fraction of the missing workers. The “low-hanging fruit” of easily recalling laid-off workers is basically gone.

More here.