by Ali Minai

Recently, I asked the students in my class whether they had used ChatGPT, the artificially intelligent chatbot recently loosed upon the world by OpenAI. My question was motivated by a vague thought that I might ask them to use the system as a whimsical diversion within an assignment. Somewhat to my surprise, every student had used the system. Perhaps I should not have been surprised given the volume of chatter about ChatGPT on my social media feeds and my own obsessive “playing” with it for some time after being introduced to it. There is clearly something about this critter that has been lacking in all the vaunted AI systems before it. That something, of course, is how well it fits in with the human need to converse. Very few of us want to play chess or Go with AI; generating cute pictures from absurd prompts is interesting but only in a superficial way; and generating truly complex art with AI is still not something that a non-technical person can do easily. But everyone can engage in conversation with a responsive companion – a pocket friend with a seemingly endless supply of occasionally quite interesting things to say. For all that it lives out in the ether somewhere, it seems pretty human. And this, let it be stated at the outset, makes ChatGPT an immense achievement in the field of AI, and truly a harbinger of the future.

What is ChatGPT – Really?

As anyone who has played with ChatGPT knows, it is a system that answers queries and carries on conversations – hence the term chatbot. In this, it is similar to Alexa, Siri, et al. But it is interesting to look a little more closely at how it works because that is key to its strengths and weaknesses. Read more »

by Raji Jayaraman

Scientists estimate that 1 in 6 bee species are extinct and 40 percent are at the verge of extinction due to habitat loss and pesticide use. The consequences are dire. Bees are major pollinators of food crops. Their extinction would threaten the earth’s ecosystem, and food chains upon which we all depend. Many of us already know this since bees have the dubious distinction of being extinction celebrities. But bees are only one part of the calamitous biodiversity loss the world has suffered in the last five decades. The World Wildlife Fund and the Zoological Society of London estimate, for example, that between 1970 and 2018, there was an average 69% decline in wildlife populations across the globe, and an 83% decline in global freshwater species. Scientists believe we are in the throes of a mass extinction (earth’s sixth), with species dying out at several hundred-fold their expected rate thanks to human activity.

Declines in biodiversity pose an existential threat to life on earth. We rely on biodiversity for our food, air, water, medicine, and almost everything else that we need to sustain humanity. Yet most people don’t even know what biodiversity means, let alone what to do about it. Definitions are a good place to start. According to the Convention on Biological Diversity, biodiversity refers to the “variability among living organisms from all sources including, inter alia, terrestrial, marine and other aquatic ecosystems and the ecological complexes of which they are part; this includes diversity within species, between species and of ecosystems.” 

As a lay person, the only clarity this definition adds to the word itself is that biodiversity is complicated. Its complexity–arising from the scale and diversity of species, their interconnectedness, lack of data, and spatial as well as temporal heterogeneity–makes biodiversity a very difficult problem to model. There are 8.7 million species on earth. What happens when one of the 42,000 that feature on the IUCN’s red list of species threatened with extinction goes extinct? How much do we even know about any of them? What are the ripple effects of species extinction on the intricate web of life, locally, globally, today, and tomorrow? Read more »

My Boat and I

My boat’s sail is the puffed dust of crescent moon
rigged on its mast at almost-opposite of noon

My boat & I once were moving slow,
but now we’re moving fast. My boat & I

are cruising into future from that which doesn’t last,
tacking through present redolent of night and day

which will last as long as it will last.
As long as it will last we’ll stay.

We’ll stay as long as we can stay,
my boat and I

Jim Culleny, © 3/3/21
Photo, Daily Mail

by Thomas R. Wells

It is easy to become exasperated with liberal democracy. Various factions bicker and manoeuvre against each other in an endless grubby contest for power, hypocritically appealing to a shared public interest while continuously generating and sustaining social divisions. Things that are necessary – like addressing climate change – do not get done, lost amidst the endless dithering, quibbling, and bargaining for advantage. Things that should not be done – like deporting UK asylum applicants to Rwanda – become official policy against all common sense and multiple laws, seemingly mainly as a way of trolling the opposition and civil society.

So it is disappointing but perhaps not surprising that people around the world are increasingly likely to endorse the strongman theory of government, that “a strong leader who does not have to bother with parliament and election is a good way to run the country”.

Strongman government has two major attractions compared to liberal democracy. First, it promises wise and benevolent rule: undistracted by factions motivated by political interests the strong leader will be freed to make wiser, better decisions in the national interest. Second, it promises decisiveness: without the endless bickering and second guessing, strong leaders can get on and do what needs to be done.

In what follows I want to challenge these apparent advantages and show that the very failings of liberal democracy are actually the solution to the problems that strongman governments run into. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Untitled. Rwanda, January 2023.

Digital photograph.

by Joseph Shieber

I’ve finally gotten around to reading Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried.

One aspect of the book that makes it so great is the way that O’Brien makes the challenge of the ineffability of his – and his comrades’ – war experiences part of the book itself. For example, he writes:

In many cases a true war story cannot be believed. If you believe it, be skeptical. It’s a question of credibility. Often the crazy stuff is true and the normal stuff isn’t, because the normal stuff is necessary to make you believe the truly incredible craziness. In other cases you can’t even tell a true war story. Sometimes it’s just beyond telling.

Reading the book in this way reminded me of the brilliant poem by James Fenton, “A German Requiem” (from The Memory of War and Children in Exile, Penguin, 1983). Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Rebecca Baumgartner

The cultural cachet of classical music and the countercultural tone of metal music would initially seem at odds with each other – one represents the Man, the other rails against him. Even many of the aficionados of both types of music would agree with that assessment. However, the listener unencumbered with such stereotypes can appreciate the similarities in both genres of music, similarities both of musical form and structure, as well as in the subjective experience of the listener. 

There are many technical similarities between classical music, especially music from the baroque period, and metal, which others more versed in music theory are better qualified than I am to discuss. At a fundamental level, both types of music are interested in exploring complexity. Sometimes this can appear like complexity for the sake of complexity, giving us the negative connotations of the word “baroque” (as in “the baroque language of government documents”). However, both the best baroque music and the best metal put their complexity to work in the service of building a musical architecture, an abstract structure that keeps the brain in motion, trying to work out how the pieces fit together.

Examples are numerous, so to narrow the field a bit, I want to focus on two concepts that are critical in creating that complexity, and how it makes both types of music more intellectually satisfying and fulfilling than your standard Top 40 hits. Those concepts are counterpoint and movement. Read more »

Top of a mountain at the border of Brixen and Vahrn in the South Tyrol.

by Michael Abraham

The shower is running. It has just begun to steam up the little bathroom in my little apartment, and I reach into it, turn the dial from all-the-way-hot to almost-all-the-way-hot. I step into the spray of the water, and I discover that, instead of almost-all-the-way-hot, I have turned the dial to nearly-tepid. I turn it back toward all-the-way-hot, and, almost immediately, I feel it scald my chest. I fuss with it. I fuss back and forth with the dial in my shower, and, as I do so, I think of you, whoever you are, whoever you are reading this essay or whoever you are who is not reading this essay and never will. I think of you, out there, in your bathroom, taking a shower in the early afternoon on a lazy day off, fussing with the dial or the handles or whatever contraption it is that controls the heat in your shower, finding yourself now scalded, now freezing. I think of you, of how we have this experience in common—this bare, quotidian experience that means nothing on its surface, that is easily forgotten in the moments after it happens, for it happens so frequently and with such little fanfare. I am thinking of you as I pick up the bar soap and soap my body. I wonder if you use bar soap, too, or if you are a shower gel kind of person. I feel fairly confident we share the experience of shampoo, but I reflect that not everyone conditions as I condition my hair. When I step out of the shower and am met with a bathroom that feels much more bracingly cold than it did when I stepped into it, I think of you as well, at how the hairs on your arms raise just like mine.

You see, I have been thinking of you a lot these days. I have been thinking of all the small, seemingly menial things that happen to me that also happen to you, of the way you swear under your breath when you burn the rice—how you cut your finger on the corner of the page of a book—how you are enchanted for a moment by a gust of wind and brought back to memories of playing in leaves as a child—how you make too much coffee and then drink too much coffee and then find yourself with a stomach ache and a buzzing mind. Read more »

by Derek Neal

If Joan Didion were alive today, she might write an essay about Prince Harry and include it in an updated version of Slouching Towards Bethlehem. She might write a passage like the one she wrote about Howard Hughes:

That we have made a hero of Howard Hughes tells us something interesting about ourselves, something only dimly remembered, tells us the secret point of money and power in America is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power’s sake (Americans are uneasy with their possessions, guilty about power, all of which is difficult for Europeans to perceive because they are themselves so truly materialistic, so versed in the uses of power), but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy. It is the instinct which drove America to the Pacific, all through the nineteenth century, the desire to be able to find a restaurant open in case you want a sandwich, to be a free agent, live by one’s own rules.

Didion’s comment about finding a restaurant open for a sandwich comes from a remark she’d heard as an explanation for Hughes buying up real estate in Las Vegas. It may seem a bit much to procure a whole town as a way of ensuring you can get a bite to eat at 3 pm in the afternoon, or 3 am in the morning, but have you ever been to Europe? My first experience of Europe was a year abroad studying in Nice, France. One day, I planned to get together with an American friend for lunch. We figured we’d meet up in the old city center, walk around a bit, then pick a place that looked good. As it happened, we were both running a little late, then we strolled around a bit too long, and finally we walked into a restaurant at about, well, 3 pm. Ever the innocents abroad, we had yet to realize our fatal error. The restaurant was deserted, and we had difficulty finding someone who worked there. Eventually, we did. After we bumbled along in our best French, asking if we could eat there and feeling confused as to why we had to ask, the proprietor cast his cold gaze upon us and proclaimed that, in France, restaurants close between lunch and dinner time. The kitchen, he said, is closed. We were stunned. Were the social conventions truly so strong that they couldn’t be amended for us, two Americans, who just wanted something to eat and secretly felt that we deserved something to eat, as well? Were we really going to be turned away? We had money, after all. Read more »

Conversation

. . .—on a painting by Jack Braudis

.

.

.

.

.

.

Boat:
. . .Your slope is russet and graceful; seems soft.

Land:
. . .It is. I see it echoes the grace of your gunnels, stem to stern.

Boat:. . .
. . .We approach your still grace, having been upon water the day.

Land:. . .. . .
. . .Who is that with you, the who with articulating sticks?

Boat:
. . .He rows, he brings me to you to lie in your shade.
. . .He imagines the sky would be good to gaze into
. . .with you beneath his back; our painter has
. . .rendered us true and sure & his clouds
. . .follow the breath of wind as they must

Land:
. . .But I’m confused, what painter?
. . .I am real and true and so is sky.

Boat:
. . .Yes, and so is he and so am I.

Jim Culleny, 11/16/22
Painting by Jack Braudis

Ada Beams. Landscape Somewhere in France, 2022.

Digital photograph.

With permission from the artist.

by Rafaël Newman

It’s been 90 years since Hitler was appointed German Chancellor, on January 30, 1933, despite his party, the NSDAP, having failed to achieve a majority in the elections to the Reichstag held the previous year; so naturally I’ve been thinking about Max Liebermann.

Born decades before the establishment of the German Empire, or Second Reich, in 1871, the painter Max Liebermann (July 20, 1847—February 8, 1935) was to die just as the Third Reich was rising to its hideous feet. Liebermann was a pillar of the German art world—or rather, he had become one by 1933, when he resigned from the Prussian Academy of Arts, the body he had served as president, but which had now fallen into line with the Nazis and had ceased exhibiting works by Jewish artists.

Max Liebermann was himself Jewish, but by the time of his death at the age of 87 he had long been accepted in the wider German bourgeois society into which he had been born, and which had persisted in its Prussian, Wilhelmine, and Weimar variations. After a rocky start to his career with scandalously “ugly” scenes of working-class life and “blasphemous” depictions of religious motifs, Liebermann would go on to play a leading role in the Berlin Secession, the fin-de-siècle movement opposed to the strictures of academic painting, which championed Impressionism and Realism and counted among its members such notable artists as Max Beckmann, Lovis Corinth, Käthe Kollwitz, and Otto Modersohn. Liebermann resisted the Secession’s eventual support for Expressionism, however, which moved him towards the conservative camp and prepared his entry into the Academy, the establishment’s artistic watchdog, and the mainstream of German culture. Read more »