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Sam Lubell in The New York Times:

Like his buildings, the legacy of Frank Gehry, who died on Dec. 5, at age 96, is exceptionally complex: radical, shifting, multifaceted and often misunderstood. It’s easy to reduce his structures to their superficialities, shapes and materials. But they’re far deeper and expansive — as has been Gehry’s impact on people, buildings, cities and the culture in general. He helped disrupt architecture and art — worlds reluctant to change. But he also changed how we see the world, shifting our perspective and our sense of what we were open to. Here are insights from some of the people he touched during his eight-decade career.

When he came into his own in the 1960s and ’70s, Gehry — an outsider with a chip on his shoulder — shook up an elitist, dogmatic architecture establishment with an approach based on artfulness, irreverence and intuition that employed cheap, utilitarian materials to create original forms.

More here.

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Jennifer Szalai in The New York Times:

On the evening of Dec. 4, 1975, Hannah Arendt was sitting in her living room on Riverside Drive in Manhattan when she suddenly slumped over in the presence of her dinner guests. Less than two months before, she had celebrated her 69th birthday; now, she was dead from a heart attack. Arendt certainly had her share of readers and admirers, but as one of her contemporaries later put it, at the time of her death “she was scarcely considered to be a major political thinker.”

In the decades since, Arendt has become such a revered figure that it can be hard to recall how controversial she was during her lifetime. The historian Tony Judt, writing in 1995, noted her “curious and divided legacy.” Arendt specialized in the big political questions that would naturally preoccupy a German Jew who had fled Europe during World War II — totalitarianism, violence, the problem of evil. Some of her Anglo-American critics dismissed her as too, well, European. Arendt preferred “metaphysical musings upon modernity” (Judt’s words) to the empirical data that has long been an obsession of American political scientists. But for Arendt’s admirers, the United States was in dire need of such “metaphysical musings.” They saw her as a teller of hard truths: someone who could teach a self-identified liberal democracy, flush with confidence in its superiority and resilience, about the modern ills it too often tried to ignore.

More here.

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On the Beach at Night Alone

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Sophie McBain in The Guardian:

Most people could tell you that Francis Crick, together with James Watson, discovered the double helix structure of DNA, and shaped our understanding of how genes work. Fewer know that Crick also played a key role in modern neuroscience and inspired our continuing efforts to understand the biological basis of consciousness.

Crick once said the two questions that interested him most were “the borderline between the living and the non-living, and the workings of the brain”, questions that were usually discussed in religious or mystical terms but that he believed could be answered by science. In his new biography of the Nobel prize-winning scientist, Matthew Cobb, emeritus professor of zoology at the University of Manchester, does an admirable job of capturing the rare thinker who not only set himself such ambitious goals but made remarkable progress in achieving them, radically remaking two scientific disciplines in the process.

Surprisingly, perhaps, Crick was not a child prodigy. He began life as an “averagely bright student”, born in 1916 to a provincial middle-class family: his father ran a shoe company.

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Eric Drexler at AI Prospects:

Complex ideas often require conditions and qualifiers to remain true. When these ideas are rounded off to something simpler (as always happens when ideas spread), the effects vary: Sometimes, a concept rounds to a simplification that still pushes beliefs toward truth.1 Sometimes, a concept rounds to something thoroughly false yet memetically fit — and toxic. And sometimes, the false version replaces the original,2 and true lends credibility to the false, or the false discredits the true.

This pattern — ideas that are “rounded to false” — breaks societal learning. In the past, ideas rounded to false have led to large-scale death and misery through misguided actions and missed opportunities.3 When toxic rounding happens today, we lose both insights and the ability to recognize what we’ve lost. Understanding this pattern gives us tools for recognition and defense. It also flags a warning for gatekeepers

As we’ll see, rounding to false is a particular problem when exploring ways forward in a time of transformative change.

More here.

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Ismar Volić, Andy Schultz, and David McCune in The Conversation:

Plurality voting is notorious for producing winners without majority support in races that have more than two candidates. It can also create spoilers, or losing candidates whose presence in a race alters the outcome, as Ralph Nader’s did in the 2000 presidential election. And it can result in vote-splitting, where similar candidates divide support, paving the way for a less popular winner. This happened in the 2016 Republican primaries when Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and John Kasich split the anti-Donald Trump vote.

Plurality can also encourage dishonest voting. That happens when voters are pressured to abandon their favorite candidate for one they like less but think can win. In the 2024 elections, for example, voters whose preference for president was Jill Stein, the Green Party nominee, might have instead cast their vote for Democrat Kamala Harris.

An increasingly well-known alternative to plurality voting is ranked choice voting. It’s used statewide in Maine and Alaska and in dozens of municipalities, including New York City.

More here.

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Sophie McBain at The Guardian:

Most people could tell you that Francis Crick, together with James Watson, discovered the double helix structure of DNA, and shaped our understanding of how genes work. Fewer know that Crick also played a key role in modern neuroscience and inspired our continuing efforts to understand the biological basis of consciousness.

Crick once said the two questions that interested him most were “the borderline between the living and the non-living, and the workings of the brain”, questions that were usually discussed in religious or mystical terms but that he believed could be answered by science. In his new biography of the Nobel prize-winning scientist, Matthew Cobb, emeritus professor of zoology at the University of Manchester, does an admirable job of capturing the rare thinker who not only set himself such ambitious goals but made remarkable progress in achieving them, radically remaking two scientific disciplines in the process.

more here.

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Peter Marshall at Literary Review:

It’s an irony to savour: the man who invented the Tudors was a German. If Henry VIII, his wives and courtiers exercise a stronger hold on the public imagination than their Plantagenet precursors or Stuart successors, it is because we can all picture them so clearly. That, in turn, is due to an extraordinary sequence of portraits and drawings produced between the late 1520s and early 1540s by Hans Holbein of Augsburg (c 1497–1543), many of which have become instantly recognisable. This familiarity, as Elizabeth Goldring notes at the outset of her superb and ground-breaking biography, means it is harder to appreciate just how novel Holbein’s portraits appeared to the first people who saw them. They marvelled, even more than we do, at Holbein’s ability to make viewers feel that they have been ‘granted access to the sitter’s inner thoughts and feelings, that Holbein has distilled the essence of the sitter’s nature and temperament in visual form’.

That Holbein is remembered as a portraitist is partly a reflection of modern artistic priorities, biased towards painting. One of the merits of Goldring’s appraisal is the attention she pays to Holbein’s other cultural output: book illustrations, window schemes, sets for court festivities and various forms of metalwork – there are hundreds of surviving designs for jewellery and utensils.

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From iai news:

Theoretical physicist and neuroscientist Àlex Gómez-Marín argues that modern science has become trapped in a framework that mistakes matter for the whole of reality. In this wide-ranging interview, Gómez-Marín challenges the foundations of materialism, defends the scientific study of near-death experiences, and calls for a new type of science grounded in mystery and a renewed sense of the sacred. He suggests that abandoning materialism could open the door to a deeper understanding of consciousness, death, and the purpose of human existence.

Simon Custer: You are both a theoretical physicist and a neuroscientist, and you have also been fiercely critical of materialist theories of mind and consciousness. What do you think the ultimate nature of reality is?

Àlex Gómez-Marín: I don’t know what the ultimate nature of reality is, but what I try to first assess is whether the stories that they [mainstream science] have told us about it are right, or maybe whether there are other alternatives. That’s why I’ve been a fierce critic of materialism. As a scientist, I realized that they had sold us this idea that to be a good scientist you also had to subscribe to many other -isms, like materialism, reductionism, and even secularism. And so first I think one needs to unmount these -isms, and then, as is happening today in consciousness studies, we have a huge landscape where there isn’t only one game in town, the idea that matter is the only thing that really exists. But because we are studying the hard problem of consciousness, it may be the case that other views of reality, like idealism, or even dualism, or other theories like dual aspect monism… these are philosophical ideas that now, I think, have room in science to be taken seriously.

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Mohammed Hanif in Time Magazine:

Despite rebuttals from Pakistani authorities, social media has been exploding with unverified rumors that the country’s former Prime Minister, Imran Khan, has died in prison. Incarcerated since 2023, Khan has not been allowed to meet his family or lawyers for the past few weeks, triggering speculation about his well-being. The result: assurances from Pakistani authorities that he is in good health have done little to calm protests by his family and supporters, who have been demanding more concrete proof of life.

While rumors of his death appear to be greatly exaggerated, the Pakistani establishment’s desire to erase Khan from the public imagination is very real and can be fact-checked on a weekly basis. He has already been sentenced for 14 years and faces several lifetimes in prison in more than 150 cases charging him with offenses ranging from stealing state gifts to instigating a violent attack on military headquarters.

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Jump

If the seed does not die
there is no plant

Bread results
from the death of wheat

Life lives on life

As you go the way of life

…………..Jump

It is not as wide as you think.

by Joseph Campbell
from Writing From The Heart
by Nancy Slonim Aronie
Hyperion Books 1998

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Nathan Gardels at Noema:

The most salient issue of American politics revealed in the recent elections is “affordability” for all those earners not in the top 10%. It is an especially acute concern among young adults facing economic precarity and the lost expectation of upward mobility as technological innovation disrupts labor markets.

Ready to jump on this turn of events as a path forward for a moribund party, progressive Democrats are reverting to the standard reflex in their policy toolbox: Tax the rich and redistribute income to the less well-off through government programs. As appealing, or even compelling, as that may be as an interim fix, it does not address the long-term structural dynamic that’s behind the accelerating economic disparity heading into the AI era.

In the end, the affordability challenge can’t be remedied in any enduring way by policies that just depend on hitting up the richest. It can only be met by spreading the wealth of ownership more broadly in the first place in an economy where the top 10% own 93% of all equities in financial markets.

That means, instead of relying solely on redistributing other people’s income, forward-looking policies should foster the “pre-distribution” of wealth through forms of “universal basic capital” (UBC) wherein everyone gets richer by owning a slice of an ever-enlarging pie driven by AI-generated productivity growth.

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Noah Smith at Noahpinion:

I guess it makes sense that for a lot of people, the potential negative externalities — deepfakes, the decline of critical thinking, ubiquitous slop, or the risk that bad actors will be able to use AI to do major violence — loom large. Other people, like artists or translators, may fear for their careers. I think it’s likely that in the long run, our society will learn to deal with all those challenges, but as Keynes said, “in the long run we’re all dead.”

And yet the instinctive negativity with which AI is being met by a large segment of the American public feels like an unreasonable reaction to me. Although externalities and distributional disruptions certainly exist, the specific concerns that many of AI’s most strident critics cite are often nonsensical.

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Alec Luhn at New Scientist:

Worldwide fossil fuel emissions are set to rise 1.1 per cent in 2025, reaching another record high as humanity burns hydrocarbons at ever greater rates, according to the annual Global Carbon Budget report.

In a positive sign, emissions from China, the world’s biggest emitter, appear to be levelling off, raising hopes that they may be reaching a peak and that global emissions might follow.

“We’re not yet in a situation where the emissions go down as rapidly as they need to to tackle climate change,” says Corinne Le Quéré at the University of East Anglia, UK, who worked on the report. “But at the same time there is a lot of positive evolution with China’s and India’s emissions growing less rapidly than before.”

More here.

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