by Rafaël Newman

Language changes. And I’m fine with that, particularly since it wouldn’t make any difference if I weren’t. I have made my peace with the attrition of the oblique case of the interrogative pronoun—“Who to follow”¹ instead of whom; with the replacement of the subjunctive by the indicative in result clauses—“Yet the exorbitant must be rendered exemplary or typical in order that her life provides a window onto the lives of the enslaved in general,”² rather than provide, to express a hoped-for outcome; with the transformation of i-a-u ablauts (ring-rang-rung, sink-sank-sunk) into semi-deponent verbs—“For the surface agitation of the passing car as it sunk grazed something very profound,”³ where the past participle is used instead of sank, the simple past; by the extension of the subjective “suspicious” to cover the objective “suspect”—a suspicious person is now not so much the one who harbors a suspicion of foul play, as the one who is suspected of it (no examples needed here; simply round up the usual suspects).

I can intuit the unconscious force behind such deformations, all of which perform the characteristic work of linguistic development: which is to simplify by removing or replacing forms no longer required for disambiguation, or whose vestigial inflection remains stranded after the tide has borne out most of their company (as in the case of whom, in the mostly no longer inflected idiom of modern English).

What I cannot bring myself to accept, however, whether in common speech or in (astonishingly) unedited written accounts, is the creeping use of the nominative “I” in compound objects (“Susan and I”), both direct and indirect, where the oblique “me” (that is, the accusative or dative form of the word) would be reflexively supplied were the object used by the speaker in uncompounded form. Read more »

Junya Ishigami. Serpentine Gallery Pavilion, 2019.

Photograph by Sughra Raza, August 14, 2019.

“Ishigami’s design takes inspiration from roofs, the most common architectural feature used around the world. The design of the 2019 Serpentine Pavilion is made by arranging slates to create a single canopy roof that appears to emerge from the ground of the surrounding Park. Within, the interior of the Pavilion is an enclosed cave-like space, a refuge for contemplation. For Ishigami, the Pavilion articulates his ‘free space’ philosophy in which he seeks harmony between man-made structures and those that already exist in nature.

Describing his design, Ishigami said: ‘My design for the Pavilion plays with our perspectives of the built environment against the backdrop of a natural landscape, emphasising a natural and organic feel as though it had grown out of the lawn, resembling a hill made out of rocks. This is an attempt to supplement traditional architecture with modern methodologies and concepts, to create in this place an expanse of scenery like never seen before. Possessing the weighty presence of slate roofs seen around the world, and simultaneously appearing so light it could blow away in the breeze, the cluster of scattered rock levitates, like a billowing piece of fabric.’”

More here and  here.

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by William Benzon

Sometime in 1984, after Apple had released the first Macintosh, my friend Rich sent me a short note he’d written on one. The note had some text, not much, nor do I remember about what, and a black and white image of Japanese woman that Apple had put on the over of the user guide for the Mac. I took one look and thought, “text and images together on a page from the same computer, I gotta’ have one.” So I took out a loan for $4,000 ($12,000 in current dollars for the Mac, disk drive, and printer) and bought one. I wrote text, made images, and above all, put them on the same page using the same program.

I ended up writing an article for Byte Magazine, one of the premier magazines for home computers back then, “The Visual Mind and the Macintosh.”

In my opinion, the Apple Macintosh is the most significant microcomputer since that original MITS kit. but its importance hasn’t been adequately explained. The Mac is user friendly, but even more important is what lies beyond that user-friendly interface–MacPaint. […] By making it easy for us to create images and work with them, the Macintosh can help us to think. Perhaps our society will create a pool of images for thinking comparable to our pool of proverbs and stories.

A year or so later one Michael Green published an astonishing book, Zen and the Art of Macintosh. Green used a Macintosh to place text and images together on each page, seamlessly, wonderfully. I began daydreaming about a publishing renaissance, page after page where text and image worked together in new and wonderful ways.

Alas, it didn’t happen. Retrospectively it’s obvious why. Who’s going to create such books? Relatively few people are highly skilled in the production of both text and images. Green is exceptional.

On December 6, 2024 I published the first of many posts in which I asked Claude to describe a photograph I taken of a Burger King outside the Holland Tunnel at night. When I asked, “What artist painted pictures like this?” it got the answer I was fishing for: Edward Hopper. That’s been an interesting series of posts, though I have don’t one since the end of April.

At roughly that same time, April 24, I did a post where I had ChatGPT create variations on an image that I uploaded. That’s the first post where I used an image created by ChatGPT. I’ve done many such posts since then, and created many images with ChatGPT that I’ve not posted. In many cases, perhaps the majority at this point, I gave it a photograph as the basis for an image. In some cases I asked it to modify the image in a simple way (see the coffee cup below) while in other cases I asked it use that image as the basis for a new one. In a few cases I’ve had it create an image on the basis of a verbal prompts, sometimes simple, sometimes complex.

In the rest of this post I give you a small handful of examples. As is often the case with my posts, it’s a bit wordy, so you might pour yourself a gin and tonic or a cup of tea. Or you might decide, “It’s got pictures! To hell with the words!” Let’s dive in. Read more »

by Ken MacVey

By many measures wealth inequality in the US and globally has increased significantly over the last several decades. The number of billionaires has increased at a staggering rate. Since 1987, Forbes has systematically verified and counted the global number of billionaires. In 1987, Forbes counted 140. Two decades later Forbes  tallied a little over 1000. It counted 2000 billionaires in 2017. In 2024 it counted 2,781, and in March this year it counted 3,028 billionaires (a 50% increase in the number of billionaires since 2017 and almost a 9% increase since 2024).

Wealth concentration has increased in the US in the last few decades as well according to the Federal Reserve.  It reported that the wealthiest  .1 percent (the top fraction of one percent)  has increased its share of national wealth from 8.67 % in 1989  to 14% in 2024.  The top one percent’s share has increased altogether, now accounting for 31% of US wealth.   At the same time, the bottom 50% accounted for only 3.5% of US wealth in 1989,and in 2024 that percent is down to 2.5%.

Thinktank Oxfam estimated in 2024  that the wealthiest one percent of the globe has as much wealth as 95 percent of humanity. It also predicts that in the next decade there will be five trillionaires.

To put this in personal context, if you had a million dollars and  spent one thousand dollars a day (and assuming no interest or other return on your million), you would use up the million in a little more than two and a half years. If you had a billion, at a thousand a day, you would use that up in about 2,700 years.  If you  had a trillion, you would use it up in about 2,700,000 years.  This is the result of the simple fact that a billion is a thousand times greater than one million, and a trillion is one thousand times greater than a billion. Read more »

by Priya Malhotra

The first time many of us learn the word “no,” it’s not in the context of refusal—it’s in discipline. A toddler reaches for the stovetop: “No.” She throws a block: “No.” In these earliest exchanges, no is a limit set by someone else, a redirection of will. It’s a stop sign held by authority. Children learn it as a small jolt, a micro-disruption in their experiment with the world.

And yet, the day comes when that same word becomes ours to wield. We learn—slowly, awkwardly—that no can be a boundary, not just an order. That it can protect us, define us, even save us. But by then, the baggage has already attached itself. We’ve been trained to think of no as negative, obstructive, and, in many cases, socially costly.

This is the paradox at the heart of no: linguistically, it is a word of negation; psychologically, it is an act of self-definition. It shuts a door, but in doing so, it opens a space—often the first space where personal agency can breathe.

The English no comes to us from Old English nā, a compound of ne (“not”) and ā (“ever”). In its oldest form, it was absolute: not ever. No qualification, no wiggle room. Cognates in other languages—non in French, nein in German—carry the same bluntness.  Japanese, for instance, often avoids direct negation by substituting more face-saving constructions like chotto… (“it’s a bit…”) instead of a flat iie (“no”).

Across languages, direct negation can be perceived as impolite. In many cultures, to say no outright is to disrupt harmony. Anthropologists studying high-context communication (common in parts of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East) have noted that refusals are often couched in narrative, delay, or metaphor. The word no is there in spirit, but rarely in its bare form.

In English-speaking cultures, we don’t always avoid the word—but we soften it. I don’t think so. Maybe later. I’m not sure that works for me. This linguistic hedging reflects the social weight we’ve given no—especially when spoken by women or anyone in a subordinate position. A plain refusal risks being read as hostile. And so we learn to dress it in apologies, in smiles, in disclaimers. Read more »

by Claire Chambers

Recently I’ve noticed that a new wave of state-of-the-nation – or, more accurately, ‘state‑of‑the‑world’ – novels tend to arrive clad in yellow dust jackets while bearing short, even one‑word, titles. I’m thinking of books like Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting, Asako Yuzuki’s Butter, and Rebecca F. Kuang’s Yellowface. Published in English within a year of each other, in 2023–2024, perhaps their look comes from the fashion moment yellow is having. Although the trending shade is a softer, creamier hue than the bright pop of the novels’ daffodil covers, the books’ appearance is on point for this moment in the mid-2020s. This cheerful styling helps make bookshops’ cash registers sing, appropriately enough, like canaries. In a not dissimilar way to Tadej Pogačar, who has just won the Tour de France in his yellow jersey, these books are some of the leading literary winners of the past half decade.

More significantly, this branding evokes both the social menace of the yellowjacket wasp and the macabre suspense of the TV thriller with the same waspish name. Such books carry the visual sting of a cautionary tale, even though the trio of novels are also often very funny. Their spines flash like hazard tape or symbols for radioactive waste and chemical toxins. The promise, or threat, is for narratives smarting with ecological or technological dread and familial devastation. Texts like The Bee Sting, Butter, and Yellowface are comic, edgy, and hyper-current. The literary exemplars tacitly, and probably unconsciously, recall the work of Jordan Peele. This African American film director makes movies about social division with one- or two-word titles: Get Out (2017), Us (2019), and Nope (2022). The novels, meanwhile, articulate our collective anxiety about global warming, gender and race relations, and a loss of trust in originality, truth, leaders, and institutions. In the terse titles The Bee Sting, Butter, and Yellowface the world feels compressed into a single, loaded word or phrase. The yellow jacket motif unites them: colourful and alluring on the shelf, yet signalling danger and the risk of a lethal heartbeat. Across these novels, the unmooring of climate time intersects with fractured family chronologies, as personal histories accumulate like toxic detritus.  Read more »

by Nils Peterson

Thesis: There’s the physical you sitting somewhere reading this, breathing the sweet air of the now you are in. Everything else of the you that is you is memory. Well, as we know, memory is a trickster, wily as Coyote in Native American stories. Notebooks help. Here’s a bit from one of mine and some thoughts about it what it all means.

a lost world

morning  bright sun  good jazz  soprano sax
above smoky piano on the record player  happy
wife gone off to do happy things  the world
either a flowering of daughters or filled with
daughters flowering  I eat some less-fat
mozzarella  tasteless but in a good tasting way
drink some spearmint tea  too much coffee
already  and tidy up the house  not much  but
enough  nothing to write about today  nothing
that I want to read quite enough to read
enough to sit here resting my hands on the firm
regular grain of an oak table while sun pours
warm golden honey on my back  once in awhile
I stir enough to jot something down

Well, that world was lost till I picked up an old notebook and found it, the poem (well, maybe just jottings) and the world.

We lose a world each day when we go to sleep. No, every hour we lose a hundred – a perfect quantum of a world lasting a micro second until a second quantum pushes it aside. No, not a hundred, not even a million. More. We must lose a galaxy each time we set off in sleep.

But each moment sends out a Voyager, a miniature spacecraft carrying artifacts from the Planet Now to a circling earth of the far-off solar system called Then. But memory is a counter-energy, an Enterprise flying from then to now. And then there are notebooks. Some might think of their co-author as a sly Captain Piccard, or, maybe, Coyote.

Another way – it’s nice to have memories tucked away in the cupboards of your inner house to pull out so you give the past a shake now and again like looking at a snow-globe in summer and trying to remember what cold felt like.

Here’s the next note in the notebook I quoted from above: “I put on Jan Garbarek and the Hilliard Ensemble playing “Parce Mihi Domine” and the smell of incense fills the room. This is not a metaphor. It is what I smell and I need to know why.”

Must I believe that I really smelled incense? I think I must, yet I can see Coyote out of the corner of my eye. Read more »

by David Beer

There was a prevailing idea, George Orwell wrote in a 1946 essay on the Common Toad, ‘that this is the age of machines and that to dislike the machine, or even to want to limit its domination, is backward-looking, reactionary and slightly ridiculous.’ It was only a couple of years before his surveillance society classic novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.

The aside in Orwell’s short essay captured a sense of pressure to keep-up with the technological changes of the time, a pressure to not fall behind and to not look outdated. We are feeling such pressures magnified again by the vast coverage and seemingly dramatic expansion of artificial intelligence. To not use AI, to dislike AI, to seek to limit AI, might, in Orwell’s terms, be seen to be slightly ridiculous. 

There is a pressure to turn to AI to be ever smarter, more predictive, anticipatory, ahead-of-the-game, knowing, hyper-efficient and so on. There is, as Orit Halpern and Robert Mitchell have put it, a ‘smartness mandate’. We are expected to be integrating AI into how we think, work and do things. This is partly because appearing to be algorithmic and AI savvy is equated with seeming switched-on. 

A more AI focused future can seem an inevitability. It is just too slick and the possibilities are too great for it to be held back. There is an imagined future already set out for us, an imagined ‘silicon future’ John Cheney-Lippold has recently argued, in which the future seems to already be planned out and so somehow precedes our present. At the same time this AI future is not as predictable as it might seem, when we factor in the unrest over training data access, the convoluted financial underpinnings of the AI itself, and the profoundly uncertain economic and geopolitical circumstances. Read more »

A climbing variety of roses intruding into the covered outdoor deck at the Hotel Löwenhof in Vahrn, South Tyrol. According to ChatGPT this variety is called Ballerina.

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by Christopher Hall

Sometime towards the end of March in 2016, I exited a movie theater in a white-hot rage. I don’t think my common reactions to bad movies are out of the ordinary – anything bemusement to doubts about the collaborative potential of the human race. (Some movies force you to confront the bald truth that dozens of people were involved in making an abomination, and yet none seemed able to put a stop to it.) But this movie had been a personal insult. Like a child enraged that their parent had “told the story wrong,” I was livid at Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice. Yet I was, at the time, a middle-aged man; now, 9 years later, I’m still middle-aged (more or less), still mad, and I’m still trying to understand why.

It wasn’t that I didn’t understand the movie’s pedigree. The director, Zack Snyder, was clearly a fan of Frank Miller’s 1986 series The Dark Knight Returns, a tale in which an older Batman returns to action in a grim, still crime-ridden Gotham, and which features Superman as a Cold War projection of Reaganite power. I am likewise a fan of that series (although Miller’s Batman: Year One is much better), and of the other series which inaugurated a moment of potential emergence out of the rubric of popular culture for comic books, Alan Moore’s Watchmen – also adapted by Snyder. But it didn’t take long for that emergence to largely trickle out into caricature. The 1990’s were full of supposedly realistic comic books which did little else but glorify cartoonish violence. Sadistic Batmen and evil Supermen proliferated (some, like The Boys’s Homelander, have stuck around). In the 2000’s and 2010’s there were signs of recovery, and thus Snyder’s movie – one in which there is little to differentiate Batman from the thugs he pummels, in which Superman doesn’t smile once and displays an emotional range that rarely deviates from put-upon superiority – was a throwback. After the Bush years and the GWOT, the Great Recession, at the moment in the twilight of the Obama era where we were all justified in asking what exactly his guileless Hope had accomplished, here was a movie that took two icons of justice and transformed them into naked expressions of directionless, pointless power. I realise now, as I did not then (I, along with mostly everybody else, was still at the point where I didn’t take him seriously), that the moment was even more inapt; less than a year earlier, Donald Trump had taken his ride down the escalator.

This reflection is occasioned, naturally, by James Gunn’s new movie Superman. I’ve seen it and have to concur with the general consensus: it’s pretty good. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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by Ed Simon

Nobody ever told me that half-way through Jonathan Franzen’s door-stopper modern classic The Corrections that a sentient, talking, foul-mouthed turd appears. I’d have entered into rectifying this cultural lacuna of a quarter-of-a-century in a slightly different frame of mind had I expected Franzen’s sprawling family epic with its ironic Midwestern detachment as effectively featuring the equivalent of South Park’s Mr. Hanky the Christmas Poo who appears to dementia-and-Parkinson-addled Alfred Lambert aboard a Maritime Canadian cruise ship, spreading its brown effluence and general bad vibes all across his white sheets of the cabin and then the white tiles of the lavatory. The turd is a hallucination (and he appears again), but it underscores just how much odder The Corrections is than the general literary conservatism projected onto (and sometimes declared) by Franzen would indicate. The author – frequently as castigated as any contemporary writer who hasn’t earned cancellation can be – seemingly desires the comparison to a Dickens or even a Zola, but The Corrections reads more like a less-experimental version of the writing of his friend and competitor David Foster Wallace, from the (annoying) blanked out proper names of corporations and organizations to the detailed explications of high finance or psychotropic pharmaceuticals. “Life…. had a kind of velvet luster,” writes Franzen. “You looked at yourself from one perspective and all you saw was weirdness. Move your head a little bit, though, and everything looked reasonably normal;” an apt summation of reading The Corrections itself.

Even twenty-five years after its publication, it’s hard to separate The Corrections from the circumstances of its creation. You might be familiar with the Oprah kerfuffle as regards his most well-regarded book, while the publication date of September 1^st, 2001 was arguably the most fortuitous bit of luck for a cultural release since the Strokes’ dropping of Is This It? five days earlier. Like many wunderkinds of his generation, there was and is a kind of schadenfreude in trying to bring the (obviously talented) Franzen down a bit, where one blogger’s appraisal of his being the “worst great writer” working today is somehow even meaner than Dale Peck’s hatchet-job appraisal of Rick Moody. Read more »

Rania Matar. Samira, Jnah, Beirut, Lebanon, 2021.

Archival pigment print.

From the portrait collection of the ICA, Boston.

More here and here.

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by Tim Sommers

In October of 1987, 18-month-old Jessica McClure Morales – forever after to be known as “Baby Jessica” – fell into a well in her aunt’s backyard in Midland Texas. She was lodged 22 feet down in the 8 inch well casing with one leg bent above her head. Over the next 58 hours an ever-expanding crew of rescuers worked to free her, eventually deciding to drill an entirely new, parallel shaft with a cross-cut into the well where Jessica was jammed.

Unfortunately, they soon realized that the well was surrounded on all sides by solid rock. Jack hammers barely dented it. If they could drill at all, it would not be quickly. A mining engineer showed up on the scene with a solution in the form of a new technology: waterjet cutting. Throughout the process of creating a parallel shaft, the rescuers could hear Baby Jessica singing the “Winne-the-Poo” song.

When the shaft and cross-tunnel were complete, the rescuers considered sending in a roofer, Ron Short, who had been born without a collarbone and could collapse his shoulders to get through tight spaces. But in the end, it was EMT Robert O’Donnell who crawled down and freed Jessica from her pinned position and then passed her back through the cross-cut to EMT Steve Forbes. Forbes then passed Baby Jessica to firefighters who carried her to an ambulance.

It’s basically impossible to discern, at this point, how much was spent on the rescue of Baby Jessica, but we do know that a trust fund was set up at the time that received 1.2 million dollars in donations, which is approximately equivalent to 3 million dollars today. At least on one estimate, 3 million dollars donated to fight malaria today would save 750 lives, 749 more than 1.

Was the rescue of Baby Jessica unique? Specific to a certain time or place? Read more »

by Jonathan Kujawa

A few hours’ drive north of my home is the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) in Hanford, Washington. LIGO was designed and built to detect gravitational waves. When the LIGO project was started in the 1980s, gravitational waves were a purely theoretical phenomenon predicted by Einstein’s theory of general relativity.

General relativity says that gravity should be understood as the deformation of the geometry of spacetime. If, say, two massive objects, like a pair of black holes, should collide, then this should cause waves to ripple across the universe. With enough care, we just might be able to detect these waves.

This is just the sort of large-scale, curiosity-driven, speculative research that depends on the support of far-sighted government funding agencies [1]. Over the course of several decades, the United States’ National Science Foundation funded many hundreds of researchers to make the pipe dream of gravitational wave detection a reality. In 2015, they succeeded. In my lifetime, we’ve gone from gravitational waves being purely theoretical, to detecting them, to being able to listen to them on our home computer. All thanks to decades of work by numerous researchers funded by the NSF and their home universities.

It so happens that one of those researchers was a friend of mine, Rauha Rakola. We did our undergraduate and graduate degrees at the same universities, me in math and him in physics. Rauha’s PhD thesis developed some of the theoretical and computational physics needed for gravitational wave detection. It took more than a decade from his thesis until gravitational waves were first detected — research is not for the impatient!

If we stopped after detecting a gravitational wave, that would be an impressive feat of engineering and physics, and an important contribution to our understanding of general relativity and the fundamental nature of the universe. But human curiosity and ambition know no bounds. Just as you could imagine using the size and shape of waves lapping at your feet to learn about a large ship that passed by (or an earthquake on a distant continent), we should be able to use gravitational waves to learn something about distant objects. The success of LIGO spawned the new field of gravitational-wave astronomy. Read more »