Huw Green in The Guardian:

A century ago, someone with an interest in psychology might have turned to the work of Freud for an overarching vision of how the mind works. To the extent there is a psychological theory even remotely as significant today, it is the “predictive processing” hypothesis. The brain is a prediction machine and our perceptual experiences consist of our prior experiences as well as new data. Daniel Yon’s A Trick of the Mind is just the latest popularisation of these ideas, but he makes an excellent guide, both as a scientist working at the leading edge of this field and as a writer of great clarity. Your brain is a “skull bound scientist”, he proposes, forming hypotheses about the world and collecting data to test them.

The fascinating, often ingenious research reviewed here is sorely in need of an audience beyond dusty scientific journals.

More here.

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John Horgan at his own website:

Horgan: I believe in free will, and it distresses me that you don’t. Can you give me one reason why I shouldn’t believe in free will?

Hofstadter:  One does what one’s desires determine one to do.  I, like everyone else, am filled with conflicting desires, and they fight it out inside my brain, and the fight’s winner determines what I will do.  Last weekend, for instance, I was of two minds about whether or not to go to the “No Kings” demonstration here in Bloomington.  Part of me wanted very much to be part of the collective action against all the forces of evil that have taken over this country, but another part of me wanted very much to work on a personal project that is super-important to me.  These forces inside me battled, and in the end, the go-to-the-rally force just barely beat out the work-on-your-project force, and so I went (and I’m glad I did).  I “decided” to do so in the sense that the two above-described intense desires battled it out inside of me, and the stronger of them won.  There was no freedom there; it was just a battle to see which desire was stronger.  (In case you want to read more on this, I spell these ideas out somewhat more fully in Chapter 23 of I Am a Strange Loop.)

More here.

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Some good political news for a change: Emma G. Fitzsimmons and Nicholas Fandos in the NY Times:

Zohran Mamdani, a little-known state lawmaker whose progressive platform and campaign trail charisma electrified younger voters, stunned former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo in the Democratic primary for mayor of New York City on Tuesday night, building a lead so commanding that Mr. Cuomo conceded.

Mr. Mamdani, a 33-year-old democratic socialist from Queens, tapped into a current of anxiety around New York City’s growing affordability crisis. His joyful campaign brought new voters into the fold who rejected the scandal-scarred Mr. Cuomo’s ominous characterizations of the city and embraced an economic platform that included everything from free bus service and child care to publicly owned grocery stores.

More here.  And also see this.

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Marcia Bjornerud at Noema Magazine:

Garnets, however, are the true fruit of the underworld. They occur in a variety of colors, not just red, and all of them have colorful properties and histories. Calcium-aluminum garnet is called grossular, from the Latin name for gooseberry, a reference to its translucent pink to pale green hue. Calcium-chromium garnet is a rare grass-green variety named uvarovite, after Count Sergey Uvarov (1786-1855), who, when not busy with his duties as a statesman under Russian Emperor Nicholas I, spent his time collecting unusual minerals. These calcium-rich varieties of garnet are most commonly found in marbles and “skarns” — rocks formed by the metamorphism of limestones interbedded with shale and sandstone.

Iron-aluminum garnets, whose red shades toward purple, are called almandine, a reference to Alabanda, an ancient city in Turkey. (I prefer almandine to an older term, “carbuncle,” used by the Roman natural philosopher Pliny the Elder, whose geologic curiosity led to his death in the eruption of Vesuvius in 79.) Almandine garnets are the most common type in schists — the metamorphic equivalent of shales, clay-rich sedimentary rocks.

more here.

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Michael Prodger at the New Statesman:

Burra’s hard-to-categorise career is the subject of an immaculate and revealing new exhibition at Tate Britain. It shows a man whose art reflected a rare sense of engagement with his times, especially its queer fringes. The works of the 1920s and 1930s treat his experiences in France and New York and verge on both satire and caricature. Burra used watercolour almost as oil paint and built up layers to give unusual depth of colour and subtle gradations.

It was a technique he employed in teeming images: tight-suited sailors at a bar (“Everyone was sailor mad,” said Ashton), burlesque reviews on stage and riotous Harlem ballrooms. Burra moved in a gay milieu and in such places he found a liberating sense of sexual freedom and cross-class slumming. The pictures are peopled with “types”, from heavy-on-the-make-up women and lascivious and sinister men to simple beefcakes and beauties. Some are white-eyed, as if the headiness of the bars and clubs were acting as a narcotic. It is as if Bruegel or Jan Steen had wandered from the Low Countries into seedier and more cacophonous climes.

more here.

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From The New York Times:

Zohran Mamdani, a little-known state lawmaker whose progressive platform and campaign trail charisma electrified younger voters, stunned former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo in the Democratic primary for mayor of New York City on Tuesday night, building a lead so commanding that Mr. Cuomo conceded.

Mr. Mamdani, a 33-year-old democratic socialist from Queens, tapped into a current of anxiety around New York City’s growing affordability crisis. His joyful campaign brought new voters into the fold who rejected the scandal-scarred Mr. Cuomo’s ominous characterizations of the city and embraced an economic platform that included everything from free bus service and child care to publicly owned grocery stores.

More here.

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Shelby Bradford in The Scientist:

Alzheimer’s disease is characterized by the accumulation of amyloid β (Aβ) peptides and the protein Tau in neurons in the brain. As a result, researchers focused on the central nervous system to study this disorder and its possible treatments. However, recent studies point to correlations between Alzheimer’s disease and alterations in peripheral organ systems, including the gut microbiome.^1,2 Still, researchers do not completely understand if these peripheral disruptions are caused by the neurodegeneration or if they augment the existing disease symptoms.

More here.

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News from the Universe

So, I’m looking at the front page of a newspaper.
At the bottom, there’s a picture of a woman
in dark clothes walking a snow-covered trail.
A high camera peers down at her through a dark
tracery of branches. The woman has just passed
four benches that look toward where she’s walked.
So a park, then, a winter walk in a park. The picture
is a long, thin rectangle, its center, the silhouette
of a black forked tree. Other stories on the page
seem trivial compared to this woman walking. I wonder
where she’s going and walk with her awhile.
As we stroll, I begin to understand that I want news
from the universe and it seems more to come from
this ad at the bottom of the page, than in the headlines.

by Nils Peterson

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Jan Gradvall at Literary Hub:

“I know this is considered heresy, but I like it best when it’s ice cold,” says Agnetha Fältskog, then looks around before spooning a couple of large ice cubes into her glass of Chablis.

We’re in the restaurant at the Corinthia hotel in London. It is May 2013. Agnetha will be living here for ten days while promoting her latest solo album A. Every other day she meets with media from all over the world. She has alternate days off, in order to be able to manage her schedule, work out and rest at the hotel spa, or take short walks in the West End and Soho.

What brings Agnetha the most joy on the streets of London isn’t all the trendy shops and people, but children and dogs. Her extensive knowledge of 1960s pop music is also in evidence: “Every time we hear some obscure song on the car radio, or at a restaurant, Agnetha is the one who nails exactly what it is,” says Peter Nordahl, one of her two producers on this album.

More here.

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Chris Simms at New Scientist:

“People who have more frequent nightmares age faster and die earlier,” says Abidemi Otaiku at Imperial College London.

Along with his colleagues, Otaiku analysed more than 183,000 adults, aged 26 to 86, who had taken part in several studies. At the start, the adults self-reported how often they had nightmares, and were then tracked for as little as 1.5 years to as long as 19 years.

The researchers found that those who reported having nightmares on a weekly basis were more than three times as likely to die before they turned 70 than those who said they never or rarely had nightmares.

There is a clear association, says Otaiku, whose team also found nightmare frequency to be a stronger predictor of premature death than smoking, obesity, poor diet or lack of physical activity.

More here.

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Steven Poole in The Guardian:

Identity is something socially negotiated, both claimed and given. I cannot be French if that nation does not exist; I can’t be a doctor if no one will grant me a medical degree. Social media, however, promises that we can don or doff identities like so many digital masks. We may become persuaded that identities are private goods over which we have rights of ownership and choice, that we can freely select what we “identify as”. The heightened salience of identity in modern political discourse thus represents an unwitting internalisation of the neoliberal view of humans as atomised individuals who navigate life purely by expressing consumer preferences.

The idea that the identity of the speaker should count when assessing his or her argument is what the right used to denounce as “identity politics” (now subsumed under the general concept of “wokeness”), though it is in this way a logical outcome of Thatcherite and Reaganite economics. One strong critique of the critique of identity politics, on the other hand, points out that privileged white males, of the sort who make such complaints, don’t have to worry about their identity because theirs is the default one of power and influence – whereas for various minorities identity might matter much more, not least in how it influences the ways in which privileged white males will treat them.

Philosopher Alexander Douglas’s deeply interesting book diagnoses our malaise, ecumenically, as a universal enslavement to identity.

More here.

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Josh Rothman at The New Yorker:

In January, the economist and blogger Tyler Cowen announced that he’d begun “writing for the AIs.” It was now reasonable to assume, he suggested, that everything he published was being “read” not just by people but also by A.I. systems—and he’d come to regard this second kind of readership as important. “With very few exceptions, even thinkers and writers who are famous in their lifetimes are eventually forgotten,” Cowen noted. But A.I.s might not forget; in fact, if you furnished them with enough of your text, they might extract from it “a model of how you think,” with which future readers could interact. “Your descendants, or maybe future fans, won’t have to page through a lot of dusty old books to get an inkling of your ideas,” Cowen wrote. Around this time, he began posting on his blog about mostly unremarkable periods of his life—ages four to seven, say. His human readers might not care about such posts, but the entries could make it possible “for the advanced A.I.s of the near future to write a very good Tyler Cowen biography.”

Cowen can think this way because large language models, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude, are, among other things, reading machines.

more here.

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future

there are many futures fortune tellers cannot tell,
bombs blitz over skyscrapers in Tehran and Tel Aviv
meanwhile children in Gaza sell their smiles to
cameras, aid workers yell and there is some sort
of nonsense that is discussed under ebony ceilings
under sleek conditions, American president is busy
making ceasefires and fires simultaneously, a lot of
language is berserk, but the Irish bard Heaney said
whatever you say you say nothing and no lyric has
ever stopped a tank, on a window Oscar Wilde’s
ghost mesmerizes with wit, and seeks answers in
guffaw and repertory, human tongue is a sentence
with no future lost in the spirals of Yeatsian gyre.

by Rizwan Akhtar

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Cori Winrock at the Paris Review:

For over a century there has been just one verifiable photograph of Dickinson. In the iconic black and white silver daguerreotype, she is not wearing the white dress. She’s a teenager fixed in a dress she will live in forever. And that dress is made in an undefinable dark printed fabric with a slight sheen. Not surprising, given dark fabrics were considered more suitable as it kept sitters from becoming spectral blurs—there and not there. But people will mostly forget this first dress. There’s nothing spectacular or singular about it. The daguerreotype era produces millions of replica dark dresses. There’s no narrative we can attach to its common folds. The white fabric arrives in the future.

One hundred years of one documentary photograph and one surviving white dress going round and round, depicting Dickinson as an ethereal-looking teenager superimposed over an ethereally dressed adult. Even as it’s been told round and round that neither her family nor her considered the image a particularly good likeness. Until a second possible daguerreotype is uncovered. In the image there are two women, two dresses.

more here.

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Levi Roach in History Today:

There can be no doubt that monarchs bulk inordinately large in British history. Whether the subject be Georgian architecture, Victorian literature, or Tudor religious culture, we find ourselves framing discussions in terms of ruling monarchs and dynasties, even when the subject has little to do with them.

The risks of this become particularly acute when we turn to traditional periodisations, which are almost inevitably marked by dynastic change. In 1066 the Norman Conquest and accession of William the Conqueror marks the point of transition between the ‘early’ and ‘central’ Middle Ages, at least where England is concerned. Yet Norman influence did not first arrive on the shores of this Sceptred Isle with the Conqueror’s henchmen. It had been making itself felt for almost a quarter of a century already under Edward the Confessor (r.1042-66), the half-Norman monarch from whom the Conqueror claimed the throne (as Edward’s second cousin). Norman earls, Continental-style castles, and reform-minded French prelates were all to be found aplenty in Edward’s England.

More here.

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Helen Pearson in Nature:

Since taking over as the top US health official in February, Robert F. Kennedy Jr has overseen radical changes that have alarmed many public-health experts. The agency he leads announced that it would cut its workforce by 20,000, and cancelled billions of dollars in federal funding for research and public health. Earlier this month, Kennedy replaced all the members of an influential vaccine advisory committee with hand-picked ones, including some who have expressed scepticism about vaccines. His mission, he says, is to ‘Make America Healthy Again’. “We are the sickest nation in the world,” he said in March, “and we have the highest rate of chronic disease.”

More here.

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