Where Does Meaning Live in a Sentence? Math Might Tell Us

Joseph Howlett in Quanta:

Tai-Danae Bradley

Her lens is category theory, a way of stepping back from the specifics of any individual field in favor of a broader underlying framework that bridges all of them. By thinking of language as a mathematical category, she’s been able to apply established tools to study it and glean new insights.

Linguists hope her model can help them to prove certain theories about how grammar and meaning emerge from strings of words, and to identify how AI-generated text differs from human language. Bradley herself is more interested in how studying language in this way might allow her to develop new mathematical tools.

Quanta spoke with Bradley about how mathematics can inform the study of language and vice versa.

More here.

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What’s Happening Is Not Normal. America Needs an Uprising That Is Not Normal

David Brooks in The New York Times:

In the beginning there was agony. Under the empires of old, the strong did what they willed and the weak suffered what they must. But over the centuries, people built the sinews of civilization: Constitutions to restrain power, international alliances to promote peace, legal systems to peacefully settle disputes, scientific institutions to cure disease, news outlets to advance public understanding, charitable organizations to ease suffering, businesses to build wealth and spread prosperity, and universities to preserve, transmit and advance the glories of our way of life. These institutions make our lives sweet, loving and creative, rather than nasty, brutish and short.

Trumpism is threatening all of that. It is primarily about the acquisition of power — power for its own sake. It is a multifront assault to make the earth a playground for ruthless men, so of course any institutions that might restrain power must be weakened or destroyed. Trumpism is about ego, appetite and acquisitiveness and is driven by a primal aversion to the higher elements of the human spirit — learning, compassion, scientific wonder, the pursuit of justice.

More here.

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This desire to watch the world burn doesn’t come out of nowhere

Dannagal G. Young and Kevin Arceneaux in The Conversation:

When political psychologists introduced this concept of “need for chaos” in 2021, they described it not as a psychological trait, but as a character adaptation that occurs when some people experience a cultural and political situation that makes them feel like they are losing status and power. For some people, this feeling triggers a desire to “burn it all down” – “it” being society, institutions, the world – maybe to rebuild it all anew, or maybe just to see it all destroyed.

Only a small percentage of the U.S. population – less than 15% – tends to score high in need for chaos. But even so, understanding this minority is important to gaining insight into this political moment.

For example, people who score high in need for chaos exhibit greater support for political violence and a willingness to knowingly share hostile and false information online. And in our data, those higher in need for chaos report holding more trust in Musk, DOGE and Trump than people who score lower in the need for chaos measure.

More here.

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Loving And Hating Phish

Amanda Petrusich at The New Yorker:

Last August, Phish hosted a four-day music festival at a racetrack in Dover, Delaware. It was called Mondegreen—the word for a misheard lyric or phrase—and it was the band’s first festival since 2015. Phish—the singer and guitarist Trey Anastasio, the keyboardist Page McConnell, the bassist Mike Gordon, and the drummer Jon Fishman—was scheduled to play at least two sets a night for four nights in a row. No other bands were on the bill.

Mondegreen kicked off on a Thursday. That afternoon, I joined a long line of cars inching through cornfields that surrounded the motorway. The horizon was wavy with exhaust. The sun was fluorescent. I gazed at the stalks, fantasizing about a “Field of Dreams”-type scenario in which a ballplayer would emerge from the corn and offer me a sweating bottle of water. Eventually, I texted a friend who was already at the campground. He expressed his sympathies, then volunteered to deliver edible marijuana to my car. I demurred, but it nonetheless felt like an appropriate welcome. I would soon come to understand these two impulses—fellowship and oblivion—as central to the Phish experience.

more here.

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Method In Trump’s Madness

Sam Gindin at n+1:

Steve Bannon, Trump’s first term whisperer, once described himself as a Leninist because “Lenin … wanted to destroy the state and that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.” Trump was apparently listening and learning. There is method in at least some of the early madness of Trump’s chaotic second term.

The shock and awe unleashed by Trump wasn’t just to concentrate state power in his hands or a vengeful rampage by someone who was rebuffed in 2020. Of greater consequence is the intent to disturb the normal functioning of the “deep state” to neutralize any of its oppositional inclinations and force it on its back foot. This is not about destroying the state; state interventions serving authoritarian ends will no doubt increase. Rather it is the permanent crippling of those aspects of the state that might limit capital and address collective needs.

Trump’s erratic tariff actions, alongside his reversal of the former bipartisan policy on Ukraine, has already had indirect results.

more here.

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Friday Poem

Political Speech

Democracy in America, she said,
has always been aspirational,
the bronze bell of its summons

rung by noble oligarchs
with blood on their soft white hands—
which is not to say that Democracy

in America isn’t inspirational,
isn’t a flickering beacon above
some battered shore awash in bodies—

in fact, it’s always both—
the opened arms, the double-
locked gate—which leaves us here

together, always separate, never
equal, mouthing the words
for breakfast, spitting them out

before lunch, all of us trying
to love what never loved us
back like it said it would—

those bell-tower words shimmering,
reverting to mere air from which
they were made, proving again

Democracy in America has always
been, will always be, just this:
respirational. Watch your breath,

the yogi says, feel it buzzing with
multitudinous life, each time
you welcome it in, and let it go.

by Scott Lowery
from Rattle Magazine

 

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Thursday, April 17, 2025

The lonely life of a glyph-breaker

Francesco Perono Cacciafoco in Aeon:

I am a glyph-breaker. I confess. Guilty as charged. A glyph-breaker who didn’t break anything, and that is quite paradoxical, because, to be a true glyph-breaker, you should have deciphered an undeciphered script, like Jean-François Champollion (the founder of Egyptology, who decoded the Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs), Henry Rawlinson (who gave us the key to cuneiform) or Michael Ventris (who deciphered Linear B). Well, I didn’t. But I tried. I still try, in a way. And, in our times of devolution, that probably qualifies a guy to be called a glyph-breaker. The age of the great decipherments is, in all likelihood, over. What remains: a considerable amount of poorly documented, extremely elusive writing systems and ‘inscribed relics’, like Linear A, the Indus Valley Script, Rongorongo, and the Singapore Stone. Puzzles. Possibly unsolvable. Headache-generators. Nasty stuff.

Despite this, a glyph-breaker cannot be scared. A glyph-breaker doesn’t surrender. Theoretically. I started a quarter of century ago, in 1999, when I was at the University of Pisa in Italy, with Linear A, the undeciphered writing system from Bronze Age Crete, ‘hiding’ the so-called (unknown) Minoan language. I probably studied everything there was to study on that script, I reproduced many of the previous (and unsuccessful) decipherment attempts, and I tried to decipher the writing system by myself. I failed.

More here.

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How Virologists Lost the Gain-of-Function Debate

M. Anthony Mills in The New Atlantis:

As with so many other scientific controversies in our political life, public opinion on Covid origins has come to track — and serve as a signifier for — partisan identity. This bodes ill for dispassionate investigation, which we must have if we want to know the truth about what actually threw the world into chaos for years and killed 27 million people.

At the same time, the controversy over Covid origins thrust into the center of our culture wars a substantive debate in science policy that has been raging among experts for decades, and will continue regardless of when or whether the true origin of the virus is established. That debate turns on the risks and benefits of the very kind of research alleged to have caused the pandemic.

On the one hand are virologists, specialists in the subfield of microbiology who study viruses. Many of them have long argued that experiments in which pathogens are genetically manipulated in ways that can render them more pathogenic, virulent, or transmissible — so-called “gain-of-function” experiments — provide invaluable sources of knowledge to help us prepare for future pandemics. On the other hand are critics, including microbiologists as well as experts in biosecurity, biosafety, and public health, who have long questioned whether these experiments are worth the risk.

More here.

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Harvard fights back against Trump

Amanda Marcotte at Salon:

“The University will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights,” Harvard President Alan Garber declared in a public letter. Garber subtly scoffed at the notion that the “reforms” demanded by Trump have jack-all to do with “fighting anti-semitism,” making clear that Trump’s defunding threats are about silencing progressive thought, forcing the school to hire MAGA hacks as professors and making life so hellish for students it would permanently tarnish the school’s brand. Garber also noted that the White House wants to “’audit’ the viewpoints of our student body” and ban students who have political views Trump doesn’t like.

Harvard’s endowment is large enough to weather the loss of federal funding. Nonetheless, this is an important move that can help stiffen the spines at other schools. Already, the leadership at Stanford University has piped up in support, with a similar vow to tell Trump to shove his authoritarian demands. At Yale, 876 faculty members signed a letter supporting Harvard’s actions. Several other Ivy League universities joined with a group of state schools to file a lawsuit against Trump’s funding cuts on Monday. After Harvard’s public stand, even Columbia’s interim president issued a statement saying the school no longer consents to some of the Trump administration’s “overly prescriptive” demands.

“Harvard has set an example for other higher-ed institutions,” former President Barack Obama said in response. “Let’s hope other institutions follow suit.”

More here.

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On the Real-Life Story of Deep-Cover Russian Spies

Shaun Walker at Lit Hub:

The fundamental role of intelligence agencies is to obtain information about other countries not available through open channels. Much of this work is done in the shadows, and most intelligence agencies use undercover operatives. The simplest way to do so is to disguise spies as diplomats. If caught, they can simply return home, claiming diplomatic immunity. But this also makes it easy for a host nation’s counterintelligence services to monitor the operatives. Diplomats are known entities and are tracked carefully. Some intelligence agencies will therefore use a riskier but harder-to-detect option. A spy is dispatched abroad posing as a business executive or other innocent-seeming professional, perhaps carving out a long and successful career in the cover role while all the time secretly developing useful sources and sending back intelligence. The CIA calls this “non-official cover.”

Moscow’s illegals program took this concept several steps further. The KGB put ordinary Soviet citizens like Elena and Andrei through years of training to transform them into Westerners. They would then spend decades living abroad, blending into their host societies.

more here.

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The Uprooting of Palestinian Olive Trees

Adam Broomberg and Rafael Gonzalez at Cabinet Magazine:

Precisely for this strong physical, cultural, symbolic, and economic relationship with the Palestinians, olive trees have become targets for violence by the state of Israel and by Israeli settlers. A study published in 2012 by the Applied Research Institute Jerusalem estimated that since 1967 Israeli authorities have uprooted eight hundred thousand Palestinian olive trees in the West Bank. Of 211 reported incidents of trees being cut down, set ablaze, stolen, or otherwise vandalized in the West Bank between 2005 and 2013, only 4 resulted in police indictments.

There are multiple rationales behind uprooting trees. As punitive measures, such practices predate the state of Israel. Ottoman rulers uprooted the olive trees of local farmers (fellahin) as punishment for tax avoidance, and the British administration in Palestine later carried out uprootings through emergency regulations. However, Israel’s central rationale for uprooting olive trees has not been presented as punitive, or at least not explicitly so: the Israeli army has uprooted and continues to uproot thousands of olive and other fruit trees for the construction and maintenance of the Separation Wall and to secure roads, increase visibility, and make way for watchtowers, checkpoints, and security fences around settlements in the West Bank.

more here.

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Encouraging Harvard to Resist

Max Krupnick in Harvard Magazine:

Throughout the past month, several groups of Harvard alumni and faculty members have written and signed open letters encouraging President Alan M. Garber and the Corporation to stand up to the Trump administration. The ways in which the letters build off each other, adjusting requests over time, reflect the changing nature of the government’s pressures on higher education.

The first letter, written by Jim Stodder ’71 was published in response to Khalil’s arrest. Stodder, a former Vietnam War student protester who now regrets participating in the 1969 University Hall takeover, initiated the petition on the class of 1971 email list, edited it with peers, and published it online on March 18. Now signed by 1,888 alumni, the letter urges “Harvard to make an open-letter statement that it will govern its own internal affairs, and protect the free speech and right to due process of all its students, faculty, and staff.” Stodder condemned Khalil’s arrest, writing, “It is hard to imagine any government action more destructive of academic freedom and open debate.”

He encouraged Garber to resist demands that the federal government might make of Harvard. (Read about those demands, made on April 3.) “Unless the presidents of U.S. colleges and universities speak out and stand together for their students and faculty, the Trump administration will feel no limits in going after those institutions,” the letter continues. “We cannot appease the Trump administration—it always asks for more. It will soon ask to see our course offerings, speakers’ lists, staff’s CVs, admissions notes, and so on.”

Notably absent from Stodder’s letter is any mention of campus antisemitism—the nominal reason for the federal administration’s demands.

More here.

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Webb telescope detects a possible signature of life on a distant world

Joel Achenbach in The Washington Post:

A distant planet’s atmosphere shows signs of molecules that on Earth are associated only with biological activity, a possible signal of life on what is suspected to be a watery world, according to a report published Wednesday that analyzed observations by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope.

…This possible detection of a biosignature could be “potentially one of the biggest landmarks in the history of science,” Madhusudhan said. “This is the first time humanity has ever seen biosignature molecules — potential biosignature molecules, which are biosignatures on Earth — in the atmosphere of a habitable-zone planet,” he added. The habitable, or “Goldilocks,” zone is the distance from a star that could allow water to remain liquid at the planet’s surface.

K2-18b, which is within our galaxy, the Milky Way, cannot be seen by any telescope as a discrete object. But it has a fortuitous orbit that crosses its parent star as seen from Earth. Such transits dim the starlight ever so slightly, which is how many exoplanets have been discovered. The transits also change the starlight’s spectrum in a pattern that — if observed with instruments on a telescope as advanced as the Webb — can reveal the composition of the planet’s atmosphere.

More here.

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Thursday Poem

I don’t Want Eternity

I don’t want eternity
it overwhelms me
I want to be alive
while I live
without thinking
about why
I live
I want to be lightning
in the air
an iridescent butterfly
a soap bubble about to burst.

by Claribel Alegría
Translation, Carolyn Forché
from: Sorrow
Curbstone Press, 1999

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Wednesday, April 16, 2025

Political economist Mark Blyth weighs in on inflation, tariffs and ‘the worst of all possible worlds’

Georgia Sparling at the website of Brown University:

As the global response to tariffs and concerns about inflation reach a fever pitch, Brown University political economist Mark Blyth is rethinking conventional economic wisdom on why prices go up and how policymakers can wrestle them back down.

In his forthcoming book, “Inflation: A Guide for Users and Losers,” Blyth and co-author Nicolò Fraccaroli analyze common assumptions about inflation and what drives it in the modern global economy, from climate shocks and demographic change to geopolitical tensions.

“The world is in a profound moment of change,” said Blyth, a professor of international economics and international and public affairs who directs the William R. Rhodes Center for International Economics and Finance at Brown’s Watson Institute.

“Inflation: A Guide for Users and Losers” will be published on Tuesday, May 6. Blyth is the author of several prior books including “Angrynomics” and “Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea.” In this Q&A, he offers his perspective on inflation and the impact of the U.S. presidential administration’s tariffs, and explains why he’s optimistic about the future.

More here.

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