Claire Heywood in The Millions:

In the early fifth century BC, the Olympic boxer Kleomedes was disqualified from a match after killing his opponent with a foul move. Outraged at being deprived of the victory and its attendant prize, he became “mad with grief” and tore down a school in his hometown, killing many of the children who were studying there. Kleomedes managed to escape the angry mob that soon pursued him, and disappeared without trace. When the community sought answers from the oracle at Delphi, they were told that Kleomedes was now a hero, and should be honored accordingly with sacrifices. This the people did, and continued to do for centuries to come.

This story, recorded by the ancient writer Pausanias, feels bizarre to modern readers. But to the ancient Greeks who honored Kleomedes, even after he had murdered their children, the oracle’s answer may not have seemed strange at all. Many of the most famous Greek heroes had, after all, committed similar acts of violence. Herakles, son of Zeus, had to complete his famous labors as penance for murdering his own wife and children in a fit of “madness.” (Unsurprisingly, this detail didn’t make it into Disney’s Hercules.) Ajax, a great hero of the Trojan War, went on a murderous rampage against his own Greek allies, though it was thwarted by Athena. The reason for Ajax’s violent rage? He was denied the right to inherit Achilles’s prized armor, which he took as an insult to his honor.

More here.

Soni Wadhwa in the Asian Review of Books:

Detective fiction in the West is often grouped with crime fiction and thrillers; but in detective fiction, the focus is on a puzzle and the process of solving it. It’s a game with the reader in which a mystery needs to be unraveled before the detective figures it out. In some places, the detective becomes a figure of interest in himself—detective figures have been, traditionally if less so at present, more often than not, men—a complex personality whose story is interesting and deserves an independent treatment of its own. It is a genre that solves problems, finds answers, holds the culprit accountable: all very attractive attributes for those who just like a good story.

To this genre, Indian writers bring a depth of cultural context, making the genre more about societal constructs of crime, power, and inequalities of caste, gender, and so on than about a straightforward resolution of a problem. In order to archive the diversity of this form in India, literary critic and translator Tarun K Saint has produced a two volume anthology titled The Hachette Book of Indian Detective Fiction which brings together writing both in English and in translation (from Tamil and Bengali).

More here.

Matthew Hutson in Nature:

The latest wave of AI relies heavily on machine learning, in which software identifies patterns in data on its own, without being given any predetermined rules as to how to organize or classify the information. These patterns can be inscrutable to humans. The most advanced machine-learning systems use neural networks: software inspired by the architecture of the brain. They simulate layers of neurons, which transform information as it passes from layer to layer. As in human brains, these networks strengthen and weaken neural connections as they learn, but it’s hard to see why certain connections are affected. As a result, researchers often talk about AI as ‘black boxes’, the inner workings of which are a mystery.

In the face of this difficulty, researchers have turned to the field of explainable AI (XAI), expanding its inventory of tricks and tools to help reverse-engineer AI systems.

More here.

Stuart E. Eizenstat in Foreign Affairs:

On September 17, 1978, U.S. President Jimmy Carter faced a momentous crisis. For nearly two weeks, he had been holed up at Camp David with Egyptian President Anwar al-Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, trying to hammer out a historic peace deal. Although the hard-liner Begin had proven intransigent on many issues, Carter had made enormous progress by going around him and negotiating directly with Israeli Foreign Minister Moshe Dayan, Defense Minister Ezer Weizman, and Legal Adviser Aharon Barak. On the 13th day, however, Begin drew the line. He announced he could compromise no further and was leaving. The talks on which Carter had staked his presidency would all be for naught.

But then, Carter made a personal gesture. Knowing that Begin had eight grandchildren and was exceptionally devoted to them, Carter signed photographs of the three leaders, which he addressed to each grandchild by name, and then personally carried them over to Begin’s cabin, where Begin was preparing to depart. As Begin read the names of his grandchildren, his lips quivered and his eyes watered and he put down his bags. Later that same day, he reached a breakthrough agreement with Sadat on what became the framework for the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty six months later.

More here.

Cynthia Haven at Church Life Journal:

Girard’s corpus is not just an erudite self-help manual, however; his intellectual landscape is not intended to be therapeutic, and yet it is. What he came to see was not a comfort, however, but something fierce and intractable. What he learned about the individual also limns the destiny of our species. Our impossible plight: the mechanism of scapegoat violence—whether on the level of the individual, or society, or epoch—is rooted in the very imitation that teaches us to love and learn, in fact, the very tissue that connects us with the rest of humanity.

His realm extends far beyond the personal, the “me”: his theories also anatomize political campaigns, world banking, international statecraft, and nuclear escalation; they illuminate our history from the beginning of time. The mystery of imitation is what threatens our survival and enables it, and for that reason alone it merits more careful study.

more here.

Kristine Hoover in Discover Magazine:

Have you ever said “I hate you” to someone? What about using the “h-word” in casual conversation, like “I hate broccoli”? What are you really feeling when you say that you hate something or someone?

The Merriam-Webster dictionary describes the word “hate” as an “intense hostility and aversion usually deriving from fear, anger, or sense of injury.” All over the world, researchers like us are studying hate from disciplines like education, history, law, leadership, psychology, sociology and many others.

If you had a scary experience with thunderstorms, you might say that you hate thunderstorms. Maybe you have gotten very angry at something that happened at a particular place, so now you say you hate going there. Maybe someone said something hurtful to you, so you say you hate that person.

More here.

Shelly Fan in Singularity Hub:

If you’ve ever vented to ChatGPT about troubles in life, the responses can sound empathetic. The chatbot delivers affirming support, and—when prompted—even gives advice like a best friend. Unlike older chatbots, the seemingly “empathic” nature of the latest AI models has already galvanized the psychotherapy community, with many wondering if  they can assist therapy. The ability to infer other people’s mental states is a core aspect of everyday interaction. Called “theory of mind,” it lets us guess what’s going on in someone else’s mind, often by interpreting speech. Are they being sarcastic? Are they lying? Are they implying something that’s not overtly said?

“People care about what other people think and expend a lot of effort thinking about what is going on in other minds,” wrote Dr. Cristina Becchio and colleagues at the University Medical Center Hanburg-Eppendorf in a new study in Nature Human Behavior.”

In the study, the scientists asked if ChatGPT and other similar chatbots—which are based on machine learning algorithms called large language models—can also guess other people’s mindsets. Using a series of psychology tests tailored for certain aspects of theory of mind, they pitted two families of large language models, including OpenAI’s GPT series and Meta’s LLaMA 2, against over 1,900 human participants. GPT-4, the algorithm behind ChatGPT, performed at, or even above, human levels in some tasks, such as identifying irony. Meanwhile, LLaMA 2 beat both humans and GPT at detecting faux pas—when someone says something they’re not meant to say but don’t realize it. To be clear, the results don’t confirm LLMs have theory of mind. Rather, they show these algorithms can mimic certain aspects of this core concept that “defines us as humans,” wrote the authors.

More here.

For Victor Jara

—A tribute to Victor Jara

Victor Jara
Victor Jara

Your name
bears the sound
of guitarra
your instrument of love

Victor Jara
Victor Jara

Your name
bears the sound
of tierra
the earth you cherished
like your mother’s songs

How I wished
there was no need
for yet another poem
dedicated to hands
that still sing and bleed

How I wished
the silence of this poem
was shattered now
by bullets of love
from your guitar

Victor guitarra
Victor tierra
Victor ah Jara

by John Agard
from Poetry International

About Victor Jara

Speak

Now is the time to speak
Lips not sealed
Body unbroken
Blood coursing still
Through your veins

Now is the time to speak
Look
The iron glows red
Like your blood
The chain lies open
Like your lips

Now is the time to speak

Speak
For the tide of life runs out

Speak
For truth and honor shall not wait

Speak
Say all that needs to be said today

by Anjum Altaf
from Transgressions- Poems inspired by Faiz Ahmed Faiz
LG Publishers, 2019

Bruce Hood at Aeon:

My own tutee students, whom I met on a regular basis, were reporting poor mental health or asking for extensions because they were unable to meet deadlines that were stressing them out. They were overly obsessed with marks and other performance outcomes, and this impacted not only on them, but also on the teaching and support staff who were increasingly dealing with alleviating student anxiety. Students wanted more support that most felt was lacking and, in an effort to deal with the issue, the university had invested heavily, making more provision for mental health services. The problem with this strategy, however, is that by the time someone seeks out professional services, they are already at a crisis point. I felt compelled to do something.

At the time, Bristol University was described in the British press as a ‘toxic’ environment, but this was an unfair label as every higher education institution was, and still is, experiencing a similar mental health crisis. Even in the Ivy League universities in the United States, there was a problem, as I discovered when I became aware of a course on positive psychology that had become the most popular at Yale in the spring of 2018. On reading about the course, I was somewhat sceptical that simple interventions could make much difference until I learned that Yale’s ‘Psychology and the Good Life’ course was being delivered by a colleague of mine, Laurie Santos, who I knew would not associate herself with anything flaky.

That autumn term of 2018, I decided to try delivering a free lunchtime series of lectures, ‘The Science of Happiness’, based on the Yale course.

More here.

Sigal Samuel at Vox:

For months, OpenAI has been losing employees who care deeply about making sure AI is safe. Now, the company is positively hemorrhaging them.

Ilya Sutskever and Jan Leike announced their departures from OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, on Tuesday. They were the leaders of the company’s superalignment team — the team tasked with ensuring that AI stays aligned with the goals of its makers, rather than acting unpredictably and harming humanity.

They’re not the only ones who’ve left. Since last November — when OpenAI’s board tried to fire CEO Sam Altman only to see him quickly claw his way back to power — at least five more of the company’s most safety-conscious employees have either quit or been pushed out.

What’s going on here?

More here.

Atul Dev in The Guardian:

Today, Amit Shah isn’t home minister for Gujarat, but all of India. From the heart of power in Delhi, he is in charge of domestic policy, commands the capital city’s police force, and oversees the Indian state’s intelligence apparatus. He is, simply put, the second-most powerful man in the country. With the BJP poised to win the current general election, he is all but certain to remain so for at least the next five years. For Modi, he is what Dick Cheney and Karl Rove were for George W Bush – the muscle as well as the brain – rolled into one. Over the past decade, he has been the key architect in remaking India according to the BJP’s Hindu nationalist ideology.

A defining feature of life in India today is the suffocating atmosphere of menace and threat to critics of the government. Shah is the face and embodiment of this fear, which lurks everywhere, from the newsrooms to the courtrooms, and which inspires a sense of alarm that is bigger than the sum of the facts and anecdotes that can be amassed to illustrate it.

More here.

Hephzibah Anderson in The Guardian:

Sam Taylor, 53, was living in rural France with four well-received novels to his name when he realised that he wasn’t going to be able to support his family through writing alone. After being turned down for bar work in nearby Lourdes, he decided to try literary translating, starting with Laurent Binet’s Goncourt-winning novel HHhH. So began an award-winning second career that has seen him work with high-profile authors including Leila Slimani and David Diop. Now based in Texas, he has returned to novel-writing with The Two Loves of Sophie Strom. Centring on a provocative idea, it opens in 1930s Vienna as antisemitic neighbours torch 13-year-old Max Spiegelman’s home. In a parallel universe, the fire leaves Max an orphan, and he’s adopted by an Aryan family who rename him Hans and encourage him to join the Hitler-Jugend. At night, Max and Hans, on opposing sides of history, dream of each other’s lives.

Where did the idea come from?
Weirdly enough, the spark came from a line in my first novel [The Republic of Trees, 2005], about the night self and the day self, the waking self and the sleeping self. It’s sliding doors, except the twist is Max and Hans are dreaming about each other, so they’re aware of each other’s lives.

More here.

Richard Cohen at Lapham’s Quarterly:

William Ewart Gladstone was Britain’s prime minister four times between 1868 and 1894, a member of Parliament for more than sixty years, a brilliant and passionate orator, an accomplished writer, and an indefatigable social reformer. Lord Kilbracken, his private secretary, estimated that if a figure of 100 could represent the energy of an ordinary man and 200 that of an exceptional one, Gladstone’s energy would be represented by a figure of at least 1,000.

That’s some multiple. But then I vividly remember the day a Benedictine monk walked into my high school classroom and told us, “Some people are more alive than others. Even permanently so.” I find that true to my own experience, even if it is hard to state clearly in what form such vitality exists.

There are over a dozen common forms of energy, as usually itemized, from chemical, gravitational, and electromagnetic to nuclear, thermal, and wind. It is a formidable register—but human energy rarely appears in such listings.

more here.

Heidi Ledford in Nature:

The day when human sperm and eggs can be grown in the laboratory has inched a step closer, with the discovery of a way to recreate a crucial developmental step in a dish¹. The advance, described 20 May in Nature, addresses a major hurdle: how to ensure that the chemical tags on the DNA and associated proteins in artificially produced sperm and eggs are placed properly. These tags are part of a cell’s ‘epigenome’ and can influence whether genes are turned on or off. The epigenome changes over a person’s lifetime; during the development of the cells that will eventually give rise to sperm or eggs, these marks must be wiped clean and then reset to their original state.

“Epigenetic reprogramming is key to making the next generation,” says Mitinori Saitou, a stem-cell biologist at Kyoto University in Japan, and a co-author of the paper. He and his team worked out how to activate this reprogramming — something that had been one of the biggest challenges in generating human sperm and eggs in the laboratory, he says. But Saitou is quick to note that there are further steps left to conquer, and that the epigenetic reprogramming his lab has achieved is not perfect. “There is still much work to be done and considerable time required to address these challenges,” agrees Fan Guo, a reproductive epigeneticist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute of Zoology in Beijing.

More here.

Matthew Longo at The Point:

In Dutch Golden Age art, the normal is odd, and the extraordinary is ordinary. The saying in Moser’s title—“upside-down world”—derives from a Dutch expression, “de omgekeerde wereld or de wereld op zijn kop [the world stood on its head],” used to describe “when the normal order of things is reversed.” Carel Fabritius’s famous painting, The Goldfinch (1654), is a good example. It is a simple portrait of a bird chained to its feeding box. “Nothing about it should make it unforgettable—but it is unforgettable,” Moser writes.

What makes these paintings so recognizable is that their ordinary is our ordinary too. No one better exemplifies this than Vermeer, whose work foregrounds individual subjectivity, especially in its modern, secular form. This comes out clearly in his use of light—crisp, outrageous even, often streaming in from an open window—which casts his subjects into relief and lifts them from their settings. In The Milkmaid (ca. 1657-58), a woman, front-lit, pours milk from a jug; the backdrop behind her is bare. Originally a rack had been affixed to the wall, which Vermeer later painted over. He preferred the contrast of his subject’s body against the plain wall, bringing her out of the clutter and into the light.

more here.

Sam Leith in The Guardian:

‘Catland”, as Kathryn Hughes describes it, is two things. One is the imaginary universe of Louis Wain’s illustrations – in which cats walk on their hind legs and wear clothes, and humans do not feature. In the late Victorian and Edwardian eras, these kitschy pictures were everywhere and he was world famous. He’s all but forgotten now, though his influence lives on. And one of the ways it does, Hughes argues, is in the other “Catland”, the one we all live in. Wain’s career accompanied a transformation in attitudes between 1870 and 1939 in which cats went from being necessary evils or outright pests to fixtures of home and hearth.

For much of human history, cats were nameless creatures who lived on scraps, caught mice and unsightly diseases, yowled in streets, were familiars of witches and had fireworks stuffed up their bums by cruel children. Now, flesh-and-blood cats are beloved family pets, selectively bred, and accustomed to lives of expensive idleness, while fictional cats are cute rather than vicious, cuddly rather than satanic. The small part of the internet that isn’t pornography, it’s sometimes observed, is mostly cat pictures.

In 50 chapters, Hughes tours these two Catlands using Wain’s life story – “which runs, or rather zigzags, through this book” – to stitch it all together.

More here.