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sense of pressure to keep-up with the technological changes of the time, a pressure to not fall behind and to not look outdated.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 »

Brevity

What I need a good poem,
a poem lifespan-short, a poem
I can shoe-horn between instants,
a poem that, in a pinch, says so much
I’ll understand the long and short of it
by the depth of calluses building on my brain.

But that’s not happening —count ’em,
I’m already up to eight lines, so it’s
too late for brevity.

What I want is a poem that says something
without rolling on forever, Amazon-like,
swaying to rhythms of topographical switchbacks
and eddies of rivers and streams, or swirls into
another cul-de-sac of human error.

Yes, I can see now that this won’t end here
in brute summation like a dead fish
wrapped in newsprint plopped on the desk
of a collaborator, warning of impending,
but once-avoidable, consequence.

No, it’ll go on until all nouns, verbs, conjugations,
and (especially) absolute clauses, have been spent.

It’ll go on till this mine of memory and metaphor,
no more complete than the store of meanings
and explications dragged inside-out by ripping flows of
pregnant clauses scribbled in blood & bone that have
led to others, and others, and others and poured from buckets
into the tides of the sea-bound flood of recollecting multitudes
of sisters and brothers, and fathers and mothers as time
tips its hat and evaporates in the heat of life.

Jim Culleny
7/1/18  & 25

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by Hari Balasubramanian

In the long and evolving list of cognitive biases, the ‘frequency illusion’ feels most familiar: I’ve experienced it so many times that it seems almost ordinary. This is roughly how it works. First, you encounter something – an unusual word like ‘topology’, or the title of a new book or a movie – that makes you stop and notice. Then, in the days after, the same word or title crops up again and again in unrelated places, making it seem more frequent than it is (hence the name). A friend brings it up unprompted, or you unexpectedly see it at a museum exhibit. It’s not only about words or titles, of course: anything in your conscious experience – a sound, an image, a fragrance – that makes an impression can be a point of entry. Buy a new car and in the weeks that follow, you will likely start noticing others driving the same model.

The most wonderful thing about this illusion is that with each seemingly unplanned encounter there’s a thrill of recognition, a feeling that the universe is signaling to you. The rationalists among us, however, will point to a more mundane explanation: that our cognitive processes have simply been primed to notice or identify the word, image, or sound among all sensory experiences. The illusion works in concert with two other biases: selective attention, the act of focusing on certain things while excluding others; and confirmation bias, the tendency to seek evidence that supports one’s beliefs while overlooking evidence to the contrary.

The recognition that these are only tricks of the mind can be somewhat deflating. But the processes that decide what we pay attention to and what we ignore remain mysterious. Something can be frequent in my everyday experience – say, a fire hydrant that I walk past each day – yet I may not notice it at all for years. Or I might be only vaguely aware of the hydrant’s presence, as if it lives in the background of my conscious experience. Then one day, I ‘stumble’ upon it, as if I am seeing it for the first time. Details such as its shape, color, and peeling paint register in a way they never had before. From that point on, I will naturally notice fire hydrants elsewhere. But I am seeing what was already commonplace; the frequency is not an illusion.

So the more intriguing question is: Why do things that we overlook all the time, things that are hiding in plain sight, suddenly catch our attention one fine day? And what is it about our cognitive processes that filters out certain stimuli and emphasizes others? Read more »

by Mary Hrovat

I’ve come to believe that any aspect of nature, large or small, will reward patient, open-ended attention. I’ve been photographing the sky for three years. Here I describe some of the things that I’ve come to appreciate about it.

The sky is full of color and light. It’s blue, of course, and children drawing the sky tend to leave it at that. When you look closely, though, you can see so many shades of blue, so many variations in the light. I could write at great length about the incredible colors of sunrise and sunset, or the marvels of light and shadow in the golden hour, or the varieties of lightning. But even in a clear sky at midday, the color varies across the sky. Twilight has its own shades of blue.

Clouds have innumerable colors, ranging from pure white through many subtle grays to almost black. They sometimes cast shadows on each other or on the sky. Water droplets and ice crystals in the sky can cause colorful or even startling effects such as rainbows, sun dogs, and sun pillars. And at night, in addition to the moon, there are planets, comets, meteors—less brilliant, more subtle, and infinitely engaging.

The sky is always in motion. One of the first things I noticed when I began to photograph the sky daily was that it changes hour by hour, if not moment by moment. I’ve known for a long time that clouds move, of course; I remember being thrilled by that fact as a child. But it wasn’t until I began photographing the sky daily that I finally began to notice how variable it is. If I see clouds that I’d like to photograph, I need to do it right now. On a stormy day, clouds may race through the sky. When the moon is above the horizon, it can be especially easy to see clouds as they alternately reveal and conceal the moon.

Certainly there are sunny days with few clouds. On other days, especially in winter, the clouds can seem like a heavy featureless blanket from dawn to dusk. Even then, in both cases, the sky’s appearance often shifts subtly throughout the day. Read more »

by Alizah Holstein

Once upon a time, summer meant windows thrown open, midnight breezes, the cooing of doves at dawn. Now, though, the panes have fallen. My family has at long last joined the approximately ninety percent of American households with access to air conditioning. Statistically speaking, it’s possible we had already joined that number: for the past four years, window units have cooled two of our three bedrooms when necessary. But the kitchen remained hot, the dining room sticky, the third-floor offices all but unusable for four or five months of the year.

I will not mince words: after years of resisting systemic cooling, I concede it’s a profound relief. I’m comfortable, sleeping well, and feeling productive. Just days into our new arrangement, I already regard my life as divided into two distinct eras: BCE (Before Conditioning Era) and CE (Conditioning Era). In the period from 50 BCE, when I was born, to approximately 20 BCE, summer temperatures in New England and the mid-Atlantic were often hot but rarely unbearable. But from 20 BCE on, summer days, and even autumn ones, have grown hotter and more humid. Now even nights can be tough to bear. When I sauntered out at 7:45 one morning last month to walk my dog, the temperature was 80 degrees Fahrenheit with 92% humidity—a combination one might resent even at the height of day. But of course, it was just the start of it.

And yet for all its pleasures, I partake in this new era with some misgivings. In part my hesitation is personal because some things I enjoy about summer are inevitably now less noticeable to me: a sudden gust of wind; the smell of grass; the sounds of children playing outside. As for my own kids, I don’t want them to grow up oblivious to the outside world as they move between one anodyne climate-controlled indoor space and another. Nor do I believe it’s in their best interest to come to expect comfort at all times. But I worry that I, too, might come to expect it. Read more »

by Steve Szilagyi

The suburban lawn. It’s as loaded with symbolism as it is with chemicals. That perfect green expanse stands for everything people hate about people like me: the smug squire in his tony ranch house.

I wasn’t always this way. Back in the 1980s, I was an Upper West Sider who laughed with the outrageous comedian Sam Kinison, as he screamed what I considered the last word on yard care:

“Once my life was so boring, I actually worried about my yard. Hey, do me a favor—if you see me outside painting the house, working in the yard… kill me! Shoot me in the head, run me over with the car—I live in hell, I live in hell, AUUUGH!”

Today, I live happily in Sam Kinison’s inferno. Okay, not exactly. I pay a guy to paint and do yard work. But even if I don’t personally care for my lawn, I do care about it. So do my neighbors.

We all observe the unwritten rules of lawn care to reassure ourselves—and each other—that we’re not the kind of people we moved here to get away from. Few things in suburbia are scrutinized more narrowly than a neighbor’s lawn gone to seed. And few souls are more pitied than the damned fool who thinks he can escape a lifetime of mowing by replacing his grass with gravel, stones, and ornamental grasses. His efforts to evade his responsibilities are contemptible and he knows it.

Drive down our long and lovely street and you’ll see near-total consensus on the basics of suburban land management: lawns mowed, shrubs trimmed, mulch refreshed annually. But this tidy uniformity covers a caldera of hot contention—a profound disagreement that threatens to shred the very sod beneath our feet.

The issue? Roundup.

A discovery on a par with penicillin. Developed by Monsanto Corporation and now owned by Bayer AG, Roundup is a ruthlessly efficient weed killer. When it was first introduced in the early 1970s, its chief ingredient was hailed by the USDA as the “virtually ideal” herbicide. As recently as 2010, weed scientist Stephen Powles called it “a one-in-a-100-year discovery that is as important for reliable global food production as penicillin is for battling disease.”

But for many modern suburbanites, Roundup is nothing more or less than the distillation of pure evil. Read more »

by Azadeh Amirsadri

A South Asian person I dated for a year complained to me one day that I was too Iranian. He said a lot of things I did had that tint and flavor to them. We were eating lunch that I had prepared, which consisted of rice and chicken, and I had a plate of fresh herbs that accompanies most meals in Iran. As he was enjoying his meal, he continued that he had never met someone as still ingrained in their own culture as I was. When I pressed for details, he said things like having pistachios and sweets at home to go with tea, or serving fruit for dessert. The irony of it all is that he loved it when I cooked Persian dishes and enjoyed them when I sent him home with leftovers, and really appreciated the snacks I had in my house to accompany his 5 pm scotch.

He, on the other hand, was adamant about his detachment from his own country, distancing himself from his childhood and background. He primarily discussed the Irish Catholic school he attended in Lahore, the university he studied at in Russia, and his work and life in Moscow. When I asked about his parents or family, he would tell me more about their positions as physicians in the military, their proper table manners, taking tea in the afternoon, and what behaviors were not acceptable in his family. They were not the type who showed emotions and kept things very formal, an oddity in that culture. I found it very interesting, when I wasn’t confused by his comments, that he played Indian songs that his mother loved in the car during a trip we took to Arizona, as we were driving to the Grand Canyon. When he wasn’t paying attention, he too would revert to his Pakistani self, instead of the British-Russian person he made himself to be, looking down at his own people. When he did spend time with his relatives, he acted as the outrageous boundary-pushing person who would not abide by his cultural rules. Making fun of his culture and himself was somehow his way of pushing it away and asserting the new self he had created a long time ago.

My Iranian friends tell me I have become too American, that I am too direct and don’t tarof (a social system of politeness and etiquette) enough. I was also told that I was too direct as a teenager by my school friends in Iran, and for being honest back home. I was called naive, simple, and easily fooled. It may be true, since I do take people at face value, and also try to distance myself from formalities that can become a labyrinth of deceptions and conflicting messages. I lacked the street smarts that so many of my friends had and paid the consequences a few times. Read more »

by Richard Farr

On February 14 1895, The Importance of Being Earnest opened at London’s St. James’s Theatre. There was mild consternation over the lack of a moral, but most people let this pass — as well they might, having been treated to a first view of the funniest play ever written. Only four days later, Oscar Wilde’s feud with the Marquess of Queensberry came to a boil and his epic fall began. Wilde made the fateful decision to sue Queensberry for libel; what followed was public humiliation, criminal prosecution, prison, ill-health and exile. I was reminded of this story recently while listening to David Runciman’s excellent podcast Present Past Future. It’s  always a Proustian experience for me. I am immediately taken back to being ten years old. And sixteen. 

Ten because of my mother. A passionate lover of theatre all her life, she helped found a local company that put on Importance. She was cast as Algernon’s terrifyingly formidable aunt, Lady Bracknell; as a result I can hear those famous pronouncements only in her voice:

Well, I must say, Algernon, that I think it is high time that Mr. Bunbury made up his mind whether he was going to live or to die. This shilly-shallying with the question is absurd.

JACK: I have lost both my parents. LADY BRACKNELL: To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.

I’m reminded of being sixteen because Tom Stoppard collated some scraps of historical fact into an absurd idea for an Absurdist play. In 1917 James Joyce, Lenin, and the Dadaist artist Tristan Tzara could all be found working in the Zürich public library — Joyce on Ulysses, Lenin on Imperialism, and Tzara on, for example, cutting up other people’s poems and then rearranging the words by picking them out of a hat. Joyce had also become the business manager of an amateur theatrical company, The English Players, whose first production was to be Importance. Joyce had a nasty, petty financial run-in with the man cast as Algernon, a British consular official named Henry Carr. 

It took a writer of Stoppard’s talent to present these facts through Old Carr’s garbled memory, and to do so in part by lifting many of the best lines and plot elements directly from Importance. The garbled memory and the purloined drama are only two of many reasons the play is called Travesties.  Read more »

by Peter Topolewski

The 2020 documentary Gunda captures a stage in the life of a barnyard sow and her brood. The director, Viktor Kossakovsky, embarked on this mission to at least in part remind “us of the inherent value of life and the mystery of all animal consciousness, including our own.” It would be foolhardy to expect a real-life version of Wilbur from Charlotte’s Web, and anything resembling Babe would be a stretch. As we do have a tendency to humanize our animals, maybe there was a chance the film would come out like an extended video from The Dodo, where animals cooperate with warm hearts and easily recognized intentionality.

Wrong.

Like most wildlife documentaries, Gunda doesn’t show humans. Unlike most wildlife documentaries, it also lacks a narrator. Interestingly, however, at points throughout you can almost hear the voice of Werner Herzog from his own documentary Grizzly Man. That film tells the story of Tim Treadwell, a man who dealt with his life’s problems by spending summers among Alaska’s grizzlies. Where in the movements and faces of grizzlies Treadwell saw personality and intent, Herzog saw “no kinship, no understanding, no mercy. I see only the overwhelming indifference of nature.”

Why do Herzog’s words hover over Gunda? Isn’t all life connected, as the synopsis to Gunda implies? Yes, it is. All of life on our dear planet is linked and interdependent. If the web breaks, none of us, from the smallest to the largest, will find salvation moving to another planet.

But connection is not the message that came out of Gunda. At least not when viewed in 2025.

The film is less a following of the titular character and her piglets, and more a detached observation. You get the impression Kossakovsky often planted the camera and left it. There are many extended shots. One scene fixed on chickens confronting a fence made them appear completely other-worldly. And the feeling that lingered was how strange and different these animals are from us humans. How boring their lives are. How repetitive and how barren of meaning.

There is drama, though it’s difficult to imagine Gunda appreciated it, or had any sense of it, even when it was of her own making. Early on, Gunda kills—accidentally or intentionally, it’s impossible to say—a piglet. It was a straggler, maybe the runt. That’s a reminder to us viewers: the world is merciless. Read more »