Anthony Domestico at Commonweal:

Silence and endings are much on Howe’s mind these days. She is seventy-nine, slight but still spry, with a kind, angular face and sharp blue eyes. She has a puckish sense of humor: her friend, the philosopher Richard Kearney, described her to me as a “comic mystic, or a mystic comic.” The coffee shop I originally suggested was closed for the day. On our walk to the Fogg, she told me, in a voice that still recalls the 1950s Cambridge milieu in which she grew up, about her recent trip to Belfast and how much she’d loved Milkman, Anna Burns’s Booker Prize–winning novel about the Troubles.

Howe’s latest collection of poetry, Love and I, is by my accounting her seventh book in the past ten years. (Howe is so productive, and writes in so many different forms, that it’s hard to keep track of her oeuvre. Some publicity materials claim she’s published more than thirty books; others estimate forty-plus.)

more here.

Adam Kirsch at the NYRB:

Most subversive of all, however, is the writer who has the chance to become American and write in the American language but deliberately rejects it. That is the story of Minae Mizumura, a distinguished Japanese novelist who has made her ambivalent feelings about English a central theme of her work. Mizumura was born in Tokyo in 1951, and when she was twelve years old her family moved to the US after her father was transferred to his company’s New York office. She spent the rest of her childhood in a Long Island suburb and then attended Yale, where she went on to earn a graduate degree in French literature. By the time Mizumura finished her studies, she had spent more than half her life in America. Yet she decided to move back to Japan and begin a career as a Japanese novelist, returning only occasionally to the US to teach. She has published eight books of fiction and nonfiction, of which three have been translated into English over the last decade.

more here.

Jennifer Croft at The Paris Review:

I’ve been saying it for years! Every fall, the big night would come and I would set my alarm for four or six or eight in the morning, depending on my time zone, and then not sleep because I was sure Olga Tokarczuk would win the Nobel Prize in Literature. This year it happened! At 4 A.M.

High time, and perfect time. Olga has been charting her own course since the first. She has gone boldly wherever her curiosity led, never daunted by boundaries, be they constraints of genre—as in the case of Flights (first published in Poland in 2007), a “constellation novel,” to use Olga’s own term, that might not be a novel at all—or political and linguistic—as in the case of The Books of Jacob (2014), Olga’s twelfth and latest novel, which I am translating right now. It is this intrepid methodology, combined with her firm commitment to the reader’s engagement and enjoyment, that has brought her in line with some of the world’s most pressing current concerns.

more here.

mother of stains

            —after Clark Coolidge

a mother made of three buttons from three different sweaters
mother of Kleenex balled into the sleeve
the mother that sews your shirt to the lamp
mother that prefers the couch
the mother that peels cheese from a log
mother that laughs behind chipped nails
mother rated “have you been looking?” on her last evaluation
mother of stains almost washing out
mother that picks you up         forgets to kiss you
mother that calls you a name no one else knows
a loud ringing from a disconnected phone
mother who still dials in every day
a mother you hated      were lucky to have
a mother with a perfect record of attendance

by William Lessard
from Plume Magazine

John Banville in The Guardian:

I have always admired John le Carré. Not always without envy – so many bestsellers! – but in wonderment at the fact that the work of an artist of such high literary accomplishment should have achieved such wide appeal among readers. That le Carré, otherwise David Cornwell, has chosen to set his novels almost exclusively in the world of espionage has allowed certain critics to dismiss him as essentially unserious, a mere entertainer. But with at least two of his books, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) and A Perfect Spy (1986), he has written masterpieces that will endure. Which other writer could have produced novels of such consistent quality over a career spanning almost 60 years, since Call for the Dead in 1961, to his latest, Agent Running in the Field, which he is about to publish at the age of 87. And while he has hinted that this is to be his final book, I am prepared to bet that he is not done yet. He is just as intellectually vigorous and as politically aware as he has been at any time throughout his long life.

In the new book there is a plotline that is predicated on covert collusion between Trump’s US and the British security services with the aim of undermining the democratic institutions of the European Union. “It’s horribly plausible,” he says, with some relish when we meet in his Hampstead home. His relish is for the fictional conceit, not its horrible plausibility, and at once his conman father pops up with his large-browed head and his all too plausible grin. Ronald “Ronnie” Cornwell was a confidence trickster of genius, of whom his son is still in awe, and to whose exploits and influence he returns again and again, to the point of bemused obsession. “I’ve had the good fortune in life,” says le Carré, “to be born with a subject” – no, not the cold war, which many foolishly imagined was his only topic – “the extraordinary, the insatiable criminality of my father and the people he had around him. I Googled him the other day and under ‘profession’ it said: ‘Associate of the Kray brothers’.” This gives us both a laugh, though a queasy one.

More here.

Douglas Heaven in Nature:

A self-driving car approaches a stop sign, but instead of slowing down, it accelerates into the busy intersection. An accident report later reveals that four small rectangles had been stuck to the face of the sign. These fooled the car’s onboard artificial intelligence (AI) into misreading the word ‘stop’ as ‘speed limit 45’. Such an event hasn’t actually happened, but the potential for sabotaging AI is very real. Researchers have already demonstrated how to fool an AI system into misreading a stop sign, by carefully positioning stickers on it¹. They have deceived facial-recognition systems by sticking a printed pattern on glasses or hats. And they have tricked speech-recognition systems into hearing phantom phrases by inserting patterns of white noise in the audio.

These are just some examples of how easy it is to break the leading pattern-recognition technology in AI, known as deep neural networks (DNNs). These have proved incredibly successful at correctly classifying all kinds of input, including images, speech and data on consumer preferences. They are part of daily life, running everything from automated telephone systems to user recommendations on the streaming service Netflix. Yet making alterations to inputs — in the form of tiny changes that are typically imperceptible to humans — can flummox the best neural networks around.

More here.

Alison Flood in The Guardian:

The Polish novelist and activist Olga Tokarczuk and the controversial Austrian author Peter Handke have both won the Nobel prize in literature.

The choice of Tokarczuk and Handke comes after the Swedish Academy promised to move away from the award’s “male-oriented” and “Eurocentric” past.

Tokarczuk, an activist, public intellectual, and critic of Poland’s politics, won the 2018 award, and was cited by the committee for her “narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life”. She is a bestseller in her native Poland, and has become much better known in the UK after winning the International Booker prize for her sixth novel Flights. The Nobel committee’s Anders Olsson said her work, which “centres on migration and cultural transitions”, was “full of wit and cunning”.

Picking Handke as 2019’s winner, cited for “an influential work that with linguistic ingenuity has explored the periphery and the specificity of human experience”, has already provoked controversy. The Ambassador of Kosovo to the US, Vlora Çitaku, called the decision “scandalous … a preposterous and shameful decision”.

More here.

Jim Baggott in Aeon:

There is no agreed criterion to distinguish science from pseudoscience, or just plain ordinary bullshit, opening the door to all manner of metaphysics masquerading as science. This is ‘post-empirical’ science, where truth no longer matters, and it is potentially very dangerous.

It’s not difficult to find recent examples. On 8 June 2019, the front cover of New Scientist magazine boldly declared that we’re ‘Inside the Mirrorverse’. Its editors bid us ‘Welcome to the parallel reality that’s hiding in plain sight’.

How you react to such headlines likely depends on your familiarity not only with aspects of modern physics, but also with the sensationalist tendencies of much of the popular-science media. Needless to say, the feature in question is rather less sensational than its headline suggests. It’s about the puzzling difference in the average time that subatomic particles called neutrons will freely undergo radioactive decay, depending on the experimental technique used to measure this – a story unlikely to pique the interests of more than a handful of New Scientist’s readers.

But, as so often happens these days, a few physicists have suggested that this is a problem with ‘a very natural explanation’. They claim that the neutrons are actually flitting between parallel universes. They admit that the chances of proving this are ‘low’, or even ‘zero’, but it doesn’t really matter.

More here.

Farhad Manjoo in the New York Times:

A parade of American presidents on the left and the right argued that by cultivating China as a market — hastening its economic growth and technological sophistication while bringing our own companies a billion new workers and customers — we would inevitably loosen the regime’s hold on its people. Even Donald Trump, who made bashing China a theme of his campaign, sees the country mainly through the lens of markets. He’ll eagerly prosecute a pointless trade war against China, but when it comes to the millions in Hong Kong who are protesting China’s creeping despotism over their territory, Trump prefers to stay mum.

Well, funny thing: It turns out the West’s entire political theory about China has been spectacularly wrong. China has engineered ferocious economic growth in the past half century, lifting hundreds of millions of its citizens out of miserable poverty. But China’s growth did not come at any cost to the regime’s political chokehold.

A darker truth is now dawning on the world: China’s economic miracle hasn’t just failed to liberate Chinese people. It is also now routinely corrupting the rest of us outside of China.

More here.

Jordan Kisner at The Believer:

There are many debutante balls in Texas, and a number of pageants that feature historical costumes, but the Society of Martha Washington Colonial Pageant and Ball in Laredo is the most opulently patriotic among them. In the late 1840s, a number of European American settlers from the East were sent to staff a new military base in southwest Texas, a region that had recently been ceded to the United States after the Mexican-American War. They found themselves in a place that was tenuously and unenthusiastically American. Feeling perhaps a little forlorn at being so starkly in the minority, these new arrivals established a local chapter of the lamentably named Improved Order of Red Men. (Members of the order dressed as “Indians,” called their officers “chiefs,” and began their meetings, or “powwows,” by banging a tomahawk instead of a gavel.)

The Improved Order of Red Men fashioned itself as a torchbearer for colonial-era American patriotism, and its young Laredo chapter was eager to enshrine that culture down at the border. So it formed the Washington’s Birthday Celebration Association (WBCA). 

more here.

A J Lees at Literary Review:

Lithium is a silvery-white metal that is so light it can float on water and so soft it can be cut with a butter knife. Along with hydrogen and helium it was produced during the Big Bang and so formed the universe before the emergence of the galaxies. It is employed to harden glass and to thicken grease, but its best-known industrial use is in the manufacture of rechargeable batteries. Lithium salts are found in considerable quantities in brine and igneous granite and the element is present in trace quantities in the human body. Lithium is also one of the few metals – along with platinum for cancer, gold for rheumatoid arthritis and bismuth for dyspepsia – that are used as medicines.

In 1949, a 37-year-old Australian doctor called John Cade produced a paper reporting that lithium quietened patients suffering from acute manic excitement. He reminded readers that lithium salts had been commonly used in the 19th century to treat gout and other disorders believed to be associated with high uric acid levels but had disappeared from the pharmacopoeia due to safety concerns. 

more here.

Colin Grant at the TLS:

So why are publishers suddenly bending over backwards to fill their schedules with people of colour? Interviewing a range of writers, publishers and other industry professionals throws up complex and sometimes disturbing answers. It’s certainly not only about capitalizing on a trend. Sharmaine Lovegrove, publisher of the Little, Brown imprint Dialogue Books, tells me that it’s partly the result of an evolving culture of shame and embarrassment: “Agents are asking people who have a little bit of a social media presence to come up quite quickly with ideas that they can sell to publishers who are desperate because no list wants to be all white, as it has been”. With the dread of being associated with the hashtag #publishingsowhite, the simplest and cheapest way of adding black names to their lists is to put out anthologies packed with malleable first-time authors and one or two seasoned writers seeded through the collections. (A – presumably – more expensive way is to recruit Stormzy, who launched the #Merky Books imprint at Penguin Random House last year.)

But social media is not the best school for a grounding in literary technique and critical engagement. There’s an obvious correlation between the constraints of writing on Twitter (with its 280 characters), blogs or Facebook and the bite-sized ambitions of the essays that constitute some recent collections.

more here.

Ruth Wisse in Mosaic:

In May 1949, a year after the establishment of the state of Israel, the American Jewish literary critic Leslie Fiedler published in Commentary an essay about the fundamental challenge facing American Jewish writers: that is, novelists, poets, and intellectuals like Fiedler himself. Entitled “What Can We Do About Fagin?”—Fagin being the Jewish villain of Charles Dickens’s novel Oliver Twist—the essay shows that the modern Jew who adopts English as his language is joining a culture riddled with negative stereotypes of . . . himself. These demonic images figure in some of the best works of some of the best writers, and form an indelible part of the English literary tradition—not just in the earlier form of Dickens’ Fagin, or still earlier of Shakespeare’s Shylock, but in, to mention only two famous modern poets, Ezra Pound’s wartime broadcasts inveighing against “Jew slime” or such memorable lines by T.S. Eliot as “The rats are underneath the piles. The jew is underneath the lot” and the same venerated poet’s 1933 admonition that, in any well-ordered society, “reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable.”

How should Jewish writers proceed on this inhospitable ground?

There was a paradox in the timing of Fiedler’s essay, since this was actually the postwar moment when Jews were themselves beginning to move into the forefront of Anglo-American culture. The “New York Intellectuals”—the first European-style intelligentsia on American soil, clustered around several magazines and publishing houses—were beginning to gain prominence as writers, thinkers, critics, and professors.

More here.

Georgina Ferry in Nature:

On 25 April 1953, James Watson and Francis Crick announced¹ in Nature that they “wish to suggest” a structure for DNA. In an article of just over a page, with one diagram (Fig. 1), they transformed the future of biology and gave the world an icon — the double helix. Recognizing at once that their structure suggested a “possible copying mechanism for the genetic material”, they kick-started a process that, over the following decade, would lead to the cracking of the genetic code and, 50 years later, to the complete sequence of the human genome. Until that time, biologists had still to be convinced that the genetic material was indeed DNA; proteins seemed a better bet. Yet the evidence for DNA was already available. In 1944, the Canadian–US medical researcher Oswald Avery and his colleagues had shown² that the transfer of DNA from a virulent to a non-virulent strain of bacterium conferred virulence on the latter. And in 1952, the biologists Alfred Hershey and Martha Chase had published evidence³ that phage viruses infect bacteria by injecting viral DNA.

Watson, a 23-year-old US geneticist, arrived at the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge, UK, in autumn 1951. He was convinced that the nature of the gene was the key problem in biology, and that the key to the gene was DNA. The Cavendish was a physics lab, but also housed the Medical Research Council’s Unit for Research on the Molecular Structure of Biological Systems, headed by chemist Max Perutz. Perutz’s group was using X-ray crystallography to unravel the structures of the proteins haemoglobin and myoglobin. His team included a 35-year-old graduate student who had given up physics and retrained in biology, and who was much happier working out the theoretical implications of other people’s results than doing experiments of his own: Francis Crick. In Crick, Watson found a ready ally in his DNA obsession.

More here.

Psalm for God’s Mother​

​​plead with god in secret. o, moonlight. how you witness me
crack open like no other. here, i am on my knees praying god
will make me boy. my grandmother overhears and i know
god said no. o, body, wretched, unholy thing. you have never
survived a man’s gaze; so if god is a man, tell him i don’t want
him watching me change                      into myself. coming out
of a suffocating womanhood i have been forced to call home.
tonight it is a drowning. a royal asphyxiation. body drenched
in an unknowing of future. i am not allowed boyhood. i do it
anyway. the moonlight listens and i yell: if god is a man, tell him
i’d like to meet his mother. o, goddess. woman of the changing
leaves. turn me over like springtime. i am body ever-churning.
o, mother. press your hands to my chest. push my body into
wax-coated wings, pristine. please. i don’t want to see the shame
in them. yes, mother. i run off the cliff and fly this time. the sun
cannot stop me. i am free. i gift myself a new name, etched
on the back of my hand with a quill from my spine and mother:
i am still life as the sun melts my wax. behind me, every feather
becomes a bird. they sing and i become that sound. fill the air.
i smile and now i am the thing illuminating. o, goddess, i am
the sun. i will not die. on earth, my mother is warmed in my
light. eternity passes. and passes. and passes. and i am always
the sun.                                                                        her son.

by Charlie Blodnieks
from Muzzel Magazine, Summer 2019

Stuart Russell in the New York Times:

The arrival of superhuman machine intelligence will be the biggest event in human history. The world’s great powers are finally waking up to this fact, and the world’s largest corporations have known it for some time. But what they may not fully understand is that how A.I. evolves will determine whether this event is also our last.

The problem is not the science-fiction plot that preoccupies Hollywood and the media — the humanoid robot that spontaneously becomes conscious and decides to hate humans. Rather, it is the creation of machines that can draw on more information and look further into the future than humans can, exceeding our capacity for decision making in the real world.

To understand how and why this could lead to serious problems, we must first go back to the basic building blocks of most A.I. systems. The “standard model” in A.I., borrowed from philosophical and economic notions of rational behavior, looks like this:

“Machines are intelligent to the extent that their actions can be expected to achieve their objectives.”

Because machines, unlike humans, have no objectives of their own, we give them objectives to achieve. In other words, we build machines, feed objectives into them, and off they go.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

Our observable universe started out in a highly non-generic state, one of very low entropy, and disorderliness has been growing ever since. How, then, can we account for the appearance of complex systems such as organisms and biospheres? The answer is that very low-entropy states typically appear simple, and high-entropy states also appear simple, and complexity can emerge along the road in between. Today’s podcast is more of a discussion than an interview, in which behavioral neuroscientist Kate Jeffery and I discuss how complexity emerges through cosmological and biological evolution. As someone on the biological side of things, Kate is especially interested in how complexity can build up and then catastrophically disappear, as in mass extinction events.

More here.

Jake Johnson in Common Dreams:

Adding to the mountain of statistical evidence showing the severity of U.S. inequality, an analysis published Friday found that the top one percent of Americans gained $21 trillion in wealth since 1989 while the bottom 50 percent lost $900 billion.

Matt Bruenig, founder of the left-wing think tank People’s Policy Project, broke down the Federal Reserve’s newly released “Distributive Financial Accounts” data series and found that, overall, “the top one percent owns nearly $30 trillion of assets while the bottom half owns less than nothing, meaning they have more debts than they have assets.”

The growth of wealth inequality over the past 30 years, Bruenig found, is “eye-popping.”

“Between 1989 and 2018, the top one percent increased its total net worth by $21 trillion,” Bruenig wrote. “The bottom 50 percent actually saw its net worth decrease by $900 billion over the same period.”

More here.