Brandon M. Terry in the Boston Review:

Judith Butler is arguably the most influential critical theorist of our era. Her early books, such as Gender Trouble (1990) and Bodies That Matter (1993), anticipated a profound social and intellectual upheaval around sex, sexuality, gender norms, and power. Like many readers of my generation, I was introduced to Butler’s work just as these changes began to accelerate, and her ideas became part of mainstream discourse. In recent years, Butler has turned her insights about norms and exceptions, the psychic life of power, and the politics of resistance toward political ethics. In December Butler and I discussed her latest book, The Force of Nonviolence, which explores “nonviolence” as a project capable not simply of disclosing structural and repressive forms of violence, but also of productively channeling the tensions of social life away from retribution and resentment toward a radical and redemptive notion of equality.

More here.

Lauren Teixeira in Foreign Policy:

Mongolia has a strong tradition of rock groups working to modernize traditional sounds. Altan Urag, a Mongolian folk rock group from the capital of Ulaanbaatar, first succeeded in electrifying traditional Mongolian instruments almost 15 years ago. And it gave heavy metal the distinctive growl of throat singing with its seminal 2006 album, Made In Altan Urag. Mongolian bands like Khusugtun, Altain Orgil, Jonon, and Mohanik have all tweaked folk music to modern ends.

That’s a stark contrast with Mongolia’s neighbor China. Despite having 1.4 billion people to Mongolia’s mere 3 million, there’s no such thing as a distinctive Chinese national sound that mixes tradition and modernity in the same way Mongolians do—at least none that has become a serious commercial player. Instead, China has been left churning out a stream of pale imitations of other countries’ genres. That raises a big question: Why does Mongolian music slap so hard and Chinese music (with a few exceptions) suck?

More here.

Claire Jarvis in Bookforum:

In the title essay of her new collection, Rachel Cusk describes something she calls being sent to “Coventry.” This, as it is for many English families, is her family’s term for putting someone beyond the pale, for thrusting an offender out into silence. Her parents “send her to Coventry” when she does something they dislike, when she has slighted them or failed them in some way. “Sometimes,” Cusk writes,

It takes me a while to notice that my parents have sent me to Coventry. It’s not unlike when a central-heating boiler breaks down: there’s no explosion, no dramatic sight or sound, merely a growing feeling of discomfort that comes from the gradual drop in temperature that one might be surprisingly slow—depending on one’s instinct for habituation—to attribute to an actual cause.

Her parents stop talking to her; they pretend she doesn’t exist. Since she was a child, Cusk writes, “I have been terrified of Coventry, of its vastness and bleakness and loneliness, and of what it represents, which is ejection from the story.” But the particular instance of emotional exile the essay describes is different. She is now an adult, with two children and a second marriage. This time, the exile begins to feel like a safe place, a place she wants to remain; once one is in Coventry, one no longer has to fear being sent there, for starters. At the essay’s end, Cusk’s parents thaw, and make an approach, but the distance has become comfortable: “I don’t want to leave Coventry. I’ve decided to stay.”

Cusk’s decision to cut ties with her parents has a wider symbolic resonance: Choosing to remain in Coventry means separating herself from a life of natural-seeming coherence, refusing to remain within the implied security that belonging brings. “Coventry,” like many of Cusk’s essays about her life, is also about writing and the conditions under which it takes place. Living in this “place of fragments and ruins” holds a special power for an author: the power to see the story from the outside. To become a truth-teller, Cusk seems to say, one must be willing to dislocate oneself from the comfortable aspects of sociable life, of family, marriage, or friendship, and risk opprobrium by describing the world as it really is.

More here.

Ross Douthat in The New York Times:

This column tries to keep its cool, but last week I briefly surrendered to crisis and existential dread, to the sense that an entire world is dissolving underneath our feet — institutions crumbling, authorities corrupted, faith in the whole experiment evaporating. How did I enter this apocalyptic mood? Not by reading about Trump’s Washington or the Middle East, but by downloading a package of essays from The Chronicle of Higher Education on the academic world that helped educate me — the humanities and especially the study of literature, whose apparently-terminal condition makes the condition of the American Republic look like ruddy health. The package’s title is a single word, “Endgame,” and its opening text reads like the crawl for a disaster movie. “The academic study of literature is no longer on the verge of field collapse. It’s in the midst of it.” Jobs are disappearing, subfields are evaporating, enrollment has tanked, and amid the wreckage the custodians of humanism are “befuddled and without purpose.”

The Chronicle essays cover administrative and political battles, the transformed hiring process, the rebellions of graduate students, and the golfing-under-a-volcano aspects of the Modern Language Association conference. But the central essays are the ones that deal with the existential questions, the ways that humanism tries — and lately fails — to justify itself. In the most interesting one, the University of Melbourne’s Simon During portrays the decline of the humanities as a new form of secularization, an echo of past crises of established Christian faith. Once consecrated in place of Christianity, he suggests, high culture is now experiencing its own crisis of belief: Like revelation and tradition before it, “the value of a canon … can no longer be assumed,” leaving the humane pursuits as an option for eccentrics rather than something essential for an educated life. During’s essay is very shrewd, and anyone who has considered secularization in a religious context will recognize truths in the parallels it draws. But at the same time they will also recognize the genre to which it belongs: a statement of regretful unbelief that tries to preserve faith in a more attenuated form (maybe “our canon does not bear any absolute truth and beauty,” but we don’t want to live with an “empty heritage” or “disown and waste the pasts that have formed us”) and to make it useful to some other cause, like the wider left-wing struggle against neoliberalism.

And if there’s any lesson that the decline of Christianity holds for the painful death of the English department, it’s that if you aspire to keep your faith alive even in a reduced, non-hegemonic form, you need more than attenuated belief and socially-useful applications. A thousand different forces are killing student interest in the humanities and cultural interest in high culture, and both preservation or recovery depend on more than just a belief in truth and beauty, a belief that “the best that has been thought and said” is not an empty phrase. But they depend at least on that belief, at least on the ideas that certain books and arts and forms are superior, transcendent, at least on the belief that students should learn to value these texts and forms before attempting their critical dissection.

More here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0gYHLkY4qA

Deliza Spend the Day in the City

Deliza drive the car to fetch Alexis
running from she building past the pickets
make she gap tooth laugh why don’t
they think up something new they picket now
for three months soon it be too cold
to care

Opposite the Thrift Shop
Alexis ask to stop at the Botanica
St. Jacques Majeur find oil to heal she
sister lying in the hospital from lymphoma
and much western drug agenda

Deliza stop. Alexis running back
with oil and myrrh and frankincense and coal
to burn these odors free the myrrh like rocks
a baby break to pieces fit inside the palm
of long or short lifelines

Deliza driving and Alexis
point out Nyabinghi’s African emporium
of gems and cloth and Kwanza cards and clay:
Deliza look.

Alexis opening the envelope to give Deliza
of faint gray copies of she article on refugees
from Haiti and some other thing on one white
male one
David Mayer
sixty-six
a second world war veteran
who want America to stop atomic arms
who want America to live without the nuclear death
who want it bad enough to say he’ll blow
the Washington
D.C. Monument into the south side of the White House
where the First White Lady counting up she
$209,000 china plates and cups and bowls
but cops blow him away
blow him/he David Mayer
man of peace
away
Alexis saying, “Shit.
He could be Jesus. Died to save you,
didn’t he?”
Deliza nod she head.
God do not seem to be entirely dead.

by June Jordan
from the Norton Anthology

Arianne Chernok at Public Books:

In part, the distaste for thinking critically about the monarchy stems from an unlikely source. In the 1960s and 70s, social history and women’s history pioneered a “history from below,” ushering in not only a disciplinary but also an ethical imperative, one that quickly spread to neighboring fields both inside and outside the academy. A balancing swing has begun in recent years—Clarissa Campbell Orr, a historian of queenship, proclaimed in 2002 that “much is to be gained for women’s history and feminist history by looking at women at the social apex, including their roles, representations and symbolic importance for other men and women”—though studies of the elite, and especially of the monarchy (the ultra-elite), can still be regarded with considerable suspicion.⁴ Taking on the monarchy is too often mistakenly viewed as a willingness to embrace rather than to interrogate. This is particularly true for those conducting research in modern history, where records are available for subjects from a range of social classes and backgrounds. (Few, for example, would object to using Queen Elizabeth I as a focal point for a study of gender in Tudor England, given the paucity of other sources about women’s lives from that period.) In this context, to write about Queen Elizabeth II, or about the Windsors more generally, smacks not just of elitism but also of commercialism—a crass bid to boost sales and gain a broader readership.

more here.

Sam Leith at The Guardian:

And, indeed, Gibson stopped setting his novels mainly in the far future around the turn of the millennium. He changed mode. “Since Pattern Recognition I’ve been writing novels of the recent past. They’ve tended to be published in the year after they actually take place. After the publication of All Tomorrow’s Parties [1999] I had a feeling that my game was sagging a bit. Not that there’s anything particularly wrong with that book – but I felt that I was losing a sense of how weird the real world around me was. Because I was busy writing novels and whatever, and I’d sort of glance out of the window at the day’s reality and I’d go: ‘Whoah! That was really strange.’ Then I’d look back down at my page and realise that that was stranger than my page, and I began to feel … uneasy.”

So he cast around contemporary culture “for the elements of things that I had found sufficiently weird to feel that I was still doing what I had done before”. When readers don’t notice that these books are set in the present day, he says, “This is a good sign. This is what I wanted.”

more here.

David Salle at the NYRB:

It’s funny how durable the figurative is in art—it’s a reassuring presence, hovering protectively over the wilder exploits. The artist Rachel Harrison makes sculptures that are grounded in figurative forms but that are not representational in any traditional sense. Many of her pieces start with a columnar vertical core of approximately human proportions and are constructed out of fractured planes; it’s a language that reaches back to Picasso’s Cubist sculpture Glass of Absinthe (1914). Sometimes the built core is a horizontal lump of rough-textured, faceted polystyrene that resembles a meteorite on legs, to which she affixes any number of visual counterpoints: wigs, sneakers, flashlights, safety vests, modems, digital photos, and other hoarder’s junk. Her works are accumulations of several different kinds of materials, some formed, others found; they don’t portray anything more than their own meandering thoughts. They have wit and an awkward charm. You take the work in quickly, like an exclamation point. Occasionally it stings, but only for a minute.

Harrison’s starting point is a feeling of disconnectedness, estrangement, and simmering revolt fed by a finely cultivated disgust. The disgust is tempered by humor; it’s gleeful and semi-inclusive. Her work feels familiar, part of a long tradition, and also of the moment—what absurdity looks like has to be reinvented for each generation.

more here.

Jennifer Ouellette in Ars Technica:

Social perception bias is best defined as the all-too-human tendency to assume that everyone else holds the same opinions and values as we do. That bias might, for instance, lead us to over- or under-estimate the size and influence of an opposing group. It tends to be especially pronounced when it comes to contentious polarizing issues like race, gun control, abortion, or national elections.

Researchers have long attributed this and other well-known cognitive biases to innate flaws in individual human thought processes. But according to a paper published last year in Nature Human Behaviour, social perception bias might best be viewed as an emergent property of our social networks. This research, in turn, could lead to effective strategies to counter that bias by diversifying social networks.

More here.

Annette Zimmermann, Elena Di Rosa, and Hochan Kim in the Boston Review:

A great deal of recent public debate about artificial intelligence has been driven by apocalyptic visions of the future. Humanity, we are told, is engaged in an existential struggle against its own creation. Such worries are fueled in large part by tech industry leaders and futurists, who anticipate systems so sophisticated that they can perform general tasks and operate autonomously, without human control. Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, and Bill Gates have all publicly expressed their concerns about the advent of this kind of “strong” (or “general”) AI—and the associated existential risk that it may pose for humanity. In Hawking’s words, the development of strong AI “could spell the end of the human race.”

These are legitimate long-term worries. But they are not all we have to worry about, and placing them center stage distracts from ethical questions that AI is raising here and now. Some contend that strong AI may be only decades away, but this focus obscures the reality that “weak” (or “narrow”) AI is already reshaping existing social and political institutions. Algorithmic decision making and decision support systems are currently being deployed in many high-stakes domains, from criminal justice, law enforcement, and employment decisions to credit scoring, school assignment mechanisms, health care, and public benefits eligibility assessments. Never mind the far-off specter of doomsday; AI is already here, working behind the scenes of many of our social systems.

More here.

Lorelei Lee in n + 1:

I didn’t know it at the time, but that fall my body was the site of international debate about sex, work, poverty, and consent. In 2000, two pieces of legislation were passed that marked a new era in the criminalization of sex work: the US Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) and the United Nations Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children.

Feminists stood on both sides of the debate. Radical feminists and the religious right insisted that “voluntary prostitution” was an oxymoron and fought for both the UN Protocol and the TVPA to legally define all sex trading as nonconsensual sex trafficking. Liberal feminists and human rights organizations pushed to maintain a legal divide between voluntary and involuntary sex work. In the end, the liberal feminists won at the UN, but the TVPA offered a sweeping definition of sex trafficking as “the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, or obtaining of a person for the purpose of a commercial sex act.” The definition included both voluntary and involuntary commercial sex, but, as a compromise, only criminalized “severe forms of trafficking in persons.” Severe forms were defined as circumstances in which “force, fraud, or coercion” were used.

More here.

Fritz Stern in Lapham’s Quarterly:

The great French historian and resistance martyr, Marc Bloch, is supposed to have said that history was like a knife: You can cut bread with it, but you could also kill. This is even more true of historical derivatives like analogies; they can provide either illumination or poisonous polemic. The first requirement for an acceptable historical analogy is plausibility; the two situations compared must have striking similarities, and the image of the historic antecedent must be as clearly understood as possible. This becomes an unlikely presupposition when the analogy is proposed by partisans working in an age of stunning historical ignorance. Nowadays, politicians and partisans use analogies instead of arguments, convenient shorthand for their defenses of dubious policies.

It was beneficial that President Kennedy was conscious of historical analogies. During the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, he remembered how easily nations had slipped into World War I in 1914, and how important it was to give an adversary a chance to back down while saving face.

More here.

Jennifer Egan in The Guardian:

On its surface, The House of Mirth reads like a 19th-century novel. Although the 20th century’s defining technologies had all been invented by the time it was published in 1905, they had yet to substantially alter even the affluent world of the novel’s protagonist, Lily Bart. Cars were exotic playthings; telephones hadn’t supplanted visiting cards; electric light was a harsher alternative to candles. The first world war was inconceivable. And there is, too, a lingering 19th-century feel to Wharton’s disembodied approach to human physicality – especially striking in a novel whose central conundrum is sexual: Lily, a pedigreed virgin without fortune, craves the sensual pleasures of life among the very rich but cannot bring herself to marry a wealthy man, her only means of securing those pleasures for life.

Where The House of Mirth is decidedly 20th century is in its frank depiction of the changing sexual mores around the behaviour of married women. Wives have begun to divorce their husbands. And married women like Lily’s nemesis, Bertha Dorset, can commit serial adultery with impunity so long as their husbands don’t make a fuss. Wharton lays out this rule explicitly: “The code of Lily’s world decreed that a woman’s husband should be the only judge of her conduct; she was technically above suspicion while she had the shelter of his approval, or even of his indifference.”

…Wharton had already written books including a novel set in 18th-century Italy and a volume on interior design when she began drafting a novel set in the rarefied world of moneyed New York. The challenge, she recalls in A Backward Glance, was to find the gravitas in such a world. “The answer was that a frivolous society can acquire dramatic significance only through what its frivolity destroys. Its tragic implication lies in its power of debasing people and ideals. The answer, in short, was my heroine, Lily Bart.”

More here.

Dyani Lewis in Nature:

Australia is in the grip of its worst wildfire season on record. The human death toll stands at 27, and some 2,000 homes have been destroyed across more than 10 million hectares of land — an area larger than Portugal. An estimated 1 billion wild mammals, birds and reptiles have perished. Michael Clarke, an ecologist at La Trobe University in Bundoora, Melbourne, has been studying the effect of fires on native ecosystems — and how they recover — ever since a fire tore through his field site 15 years ago. Clarke spoke to Nature about how animals fare in the wake of wildfires, and why this season’s fires could prove particularly devastating.

What happens in the aftermath of a wildfire?

It is deathly silent when you go into a forest after a fire. Apart from the ‘undertakers’ — the carrion eaters like currawongs, ravens and shrike-thrushes — picking off the dead bodies, there’s nothing much left in the forest. It’s a chilling experience. For survivors, it’s a perilous existence in the months that follow. Any animal that manages to make it through the fire uninjured faces three major challenges. One is finding shelter from climatic extremes — places they can hide from bad weather, like a hollow tree or a hole in the ground. The second is the risk of starvation. And third, they’ve got to avoid predators like feral cats and foxes. They’re exposed; there’s nowhere to hide in a barren landscape. Even if an animal makes it to an unburnt patch, the density of organisms trying to eke out a living will be way beyond the area’s carrying capacity. After fires in 2003, one unburnt patch I visited in the Mallee [a region in the far north of Victoria] was literally crawling with birds, all chasing one another, trying to work out who owned the last little bit of turf. It was clearly insufficient to sustain them all.

More here.

Wise 1

WHYS (Nobody Knows
The Trouble I Seen)
—Traditional

If you ever find
yourself, some where
lost and surrounded
by enemies
who won’t let you
speak in your own language
who destroy your statues
& instruments, who ban
your omm bomm ba boom
then you are in trouble
deep trouble
they ban your
own boom ba boom
you in deep deep
trouble

humph!

probably take you several hundred years
to get
out!

Amiri Baraka
From Wise, Whys, Y’s
The Norton Anthology

David G. Stork in The MIT Press Reader:

Last month at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art I saw “2001: A Space Odyssey” on the big screen for my 47th time. The fact that this masterpiece remains on nearly every relevant list of “top ten films” and is shown and discussed over a half-century after its 1968 release is a testament to the cultural achievement of its director Stanley Kubrick, writer Arthur C. Clarke, and their team of expert filmmakers.

As with each viewing, I discovered or appreciated new details. But three iconic scenes — HAL’s silent murder of astronaut Frank Poole in the vacuum of outer space, HAL’s silent medical murder of the three hibernating crewmen, and the poignant sorrowful “death” of HAL — prompted deeper reflection, this time about the ethical conundrums of murder by a machine and of a machine. In the past few years experimental autonomous cars have led to the death of pedestrians and passengers alike. AI-powered bots, meanwhile, are infecting networks and influencing national elections. Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, Sam Harris, and many other leading AI researchers have sounded the alarm: Unchecked, they say, AI may progress beyond our control and pose significant dangers to society.

And what about the converse: humans “killing” future computers by disconnection?

More here.

John Pavlus in Quanta:

Computers can now drive cars, beat world champions at board games like chess and Go, and even write prose. The revolution in artificial intelligence stems in large part from the power of one particular kind of artificial neural network, whose design is inspired by the connected layers of neurons in the mammalian visual cortex. These “convolutional neural networks” (CNNs) have proved surprisingly adept at learning patterns in two-dimensional data — especially in computer vision tasks like recognizing handwritten words and objects in digital images.

But when applied to data sets without a built-in planar geometry — say, models of irregular shapes used in 3D computer animation, or the point clouds generated by self-driving cars to map their surroundings — this powerful machine learning architecture doesn’t work well. Around 2016, a new discipline called geometric deep learning emerged with the goal of lifting CNNs out of flatland.

Now, researchers have delivered, with a new theoretical framework for building neural networks that can learn patterns on any kind of geometric surface.

More here.