by Katalin Balog

Nathaniel in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s The Sandman loses his sanity over having fallen in love with a wooden doll, the beautiful automaton Olympia. Olympia is an invention of a mad scientist and a master of the dark arts. Like Mary Shelley’s monster, born of the romantic imagination, she is the first literary example of a human-like machine. As one of Nathaniel’s friends observes:

We have come to find this Olympia quite uncanny; we would like to have nothing to do with her; it seems to us that she is only acting like a living creature, and yet there is some reason for that which we cannot fathom.

We can sympathize with the sentiment. But uncanny as the wooden doll might have struck them, contemporary readers of the tale were meant to see Nathaniel’s infatuation as macabre farce – Olympia is clearly robotic and shows no signs of intelligence –  orchestrated by dark forces either in the world or in his soul, we can’t know for sure.

The Enlightenment’s fascination with automata (Hoffman’s story was published in 1816) prefigured our predicament, however. We now find ourselves in the curious position of having to give serious thought to the possibility, and increasingly, the reality of relationships with machines that hitherto were reserved for fellow humans. We also seem to have to defend ourselves against – or perhaps reconcile ourselves to – suggestions that AI will soon, perhaps in some regards already, surpass us in some of our most characteristically human activities, like understanding the feelings of others, or creating art, literature, and music. Read more »

by Lei Wang

It’s my birthday twice a month, every month. Or at least I treat each 13th and 27th as if it were my birthday. I don’t ask anyone else to pretend with me; I keep to the usual annual celebratory imposition. It is an internal orientation.

From morning to night on the 13th and 27th of the month (because I was born on a 13th and like odd numbers), I feel the day is special. I can do whatever I want. Technically, as a writer and freelance worker, I can pretty much always do what I want, but external circumstances don’t always match internal understandings. And the ability to always do what I want is also the pressure to be always working, no real evenings or weekends, because I can (though mostly because I’ve procrastinated during the day). How much work is enough when you work for yourself, when you are supposedly doing the work you love? Even resident doctors get two days off a month, to save their own lives. And so: my self-made fortnightly ritual.

What I always want to do is lounge around but on my “birthday,” I can lounge without an ounce of guilt. I may still choose to write a bit, but then I feel extraordinarily virtuous—to be working on my birthday! (Yes, my birthday is secretly a productivity hack.) I get the fancier chocolate at the grocery store which I may have justified on another day, but today, I don’t even have to justify. I light the jasmine-bergamot candle I have been hoarding. I am magnanimous with myself. Whatever I do, there is a rare sense of permissiveness that even real birthdays don’t have: there is some pressure to revel on actual birthdays, and the potential for disappointment, while on private birthdays I can do anything I want which includes nothing at all.

Perhaps I even need to work—probably, in fact, I have not quite planned my time well and unlike Jesus’ birthday or the birthdays of nations, my fake birthdays necessarily fall on random, inconvenient days. But even working, I think, just for today, I don’t have to be perfect. It’s my birthday. And there is a special pleasure in a random Tuesday no longer being random, just because I imagined it so. Read more »

by Mike Bendzela

We recently found out we have new neighbors. Millions of them. I had seen signs in the blond appearance of the upper limbs of some trees on the other side of the field across from our Maine farmhouse. I have been waiting a long time for them to show up, so I tell my spouse I will be right back, cross the street with my jack knife in my pocket, and stroll to the other side of the pasture to check it out for myself.

I can still remember the phone call from my mother in Ohio about twenty years ago, when she told me the city had cut down the three white ash trees in front of the house where I grew up — along with all the ash trees in the city of Toledo. Those trees, standing on the grassy strip between the concrete sidewalk and the street, were important to my growing up. I had taken one of my first nature photographs in one of those trees when I was thirteen: I climbed up a tree and got a shot of two blurry blue eggs inside a stick cup. My first botany lesson was discovering that these trees of the genus Fraxinus are among the first deciduous trees to turn yellow in the fall and the last to bud out in the spring.

Toledo was near ground zero of the emerald ash borer infestation that took hold in the United States a little over twenty-five years ago. The beetle entered the country near Detroit, Michigan after having hitched a ride on some shipping pallets from somewhere in its native Asia. Agrilus planipennis is branded an invasive species, but it’s not their fault; they aren’t invading anything. They have been inadvertently introduced to a new hemisphere and are just embracing their Malthusian duty like any good species. There were many quarantines issued throughout several states in the Midwest and Eastern seaboard as the borer spread, county by county. These quarantines proved fruitless and have all since been lifted. “Let ‘er rip,” as the cynical expression has it. As if we have a choice in the matter.

I use my pocket knife to peel back the bark on a dead tree. I uncover abundant larval “galleries,” feeding trails that look like dune buggy tracks viewed from the sky. I snap a picture with my phone and take it back to the house to show my spouse. His response is just to squint at it in resigned silence. Read more »

by Adele A. Wilby

In a recent article,  ‘What are Microplastics Doing to Our Bodies’, Nina Agrawal  reveals how researchers in a leading laboratory in New Mexico are studying the accumulation of anthropogenic microplastics in our bodies. Although present in many organs in the body, microplastic levels are, according to the research, increasing, especially in our brains. As crucially important as the research findings and the consequences for human health might be, a serious spinoff from the research is the source of the plastic samples used by the researchers, items such as toothbrushes, chunks of fishing nets and a Pokémon card.  But these plastic specimens were not from the laboratory waste bags but derived from the trash collected during a cleaning up of a beach in Hawaii. Clearly these plastic items had either washed ashore from rubbish dumped into the ocean or perhaps some illegal fly tipping close to the beach. Either way, it was trash inadequately disposed of.

As we are all aware, waste on the beach is not a new phenomenon, but it is symptomatic of a much larger and wider issue that is, or should be, a cause of real concern to everyone: the disposal of the astronomical  levels of trash produced by industry and the consumer society. Alexander Clapp addresses this crucial issue in his book Waste Wars: Dirty Deals, International Rivalries and the Scandalous Afterlife of Rubbish.

Clapp’s exposé is not a bearer of good news for humanity or the planet. He effectively creates in the reader’s imagination a dystopian planetary landscape of mountains of rubbish, polluted seas, of play fields of ash and roads of colourful microplastics as he narrates how human beings are far better at creating waste than our ability to dispose of it effectively. To gauge some idea of the enormity of the problem of waste disposal facing humanity, Clapp draws on a 2020 Nature publication. To quote him, ‘the total mass of the world’s human-made objects … equal the entire biomass of the planet itself. That is to say, the weight of everything created by our hands – skyscrapers, automobiles, iPads, plastic straws – was on the verge of exceeding that of all the trees and all the plants, all animals and all humans, indeed the mass of all living things put together’. For sure, a serious issue to reflect on and one that is difficult to imagine improving in the foreseeable future. Read more »

by TJ Price

It was an unbearably hot and humid day. The clouds were starting to mass in the west, slowly but surely rolling their way into the city and darkening as they came. For sure, it would rain a deluge by mid-afternoon. The skyscrapers were already quivering with the anticipation of it, as though their mirrored façades had become liquid and were trembling with wavelets. I was to meet Tom Nero at a location he has asked me not to reveal—suffice to say that, when first I saw him, he stood between two of these towers and on either side of the street, I could see manifold copies of both him and I reflecting. When we shook hands, there was a brief, electric frisson that passed through our fingertips. I was alarmed, but only for a moment, and his wry, self-effacing smile put me instantly at ease. This calm was to be disturbed only by the answers to my questions. Unfortunately, Tom (as he prefers to be called) specified that I was not to record his answers, so what is reported here may not be entirely accurate. I have tried, to the best of my memory and ability, to represent the spirit of his responses. Phrases quoted verbatim are in bold.

TP: Thanks for meeting with me today, Tom. I understand you have been missing for quite some time, so welcome back.

TN: I should be the one welcoming you. Have you been to the city of dreams before?

TP: Yes, I lived here for many years, mostly during the pandemic. I didn’t care for it very much. I don’t think that this many people should all live in so small a space. There’s no room.

TN: Every city—even the largest—is made up of lots of little smallnesses, all of which combine to create its largeness. Enormity, after all, can only be defined as something which is beyond our scope, something which surpasses our ability to describe. Not to mention that what is small to you might be big to me, and on and on, and vice versa, et cetera. There are many empty rooms in the city of dreams.

TP: This brings to mind another question: if this truly is the city of dreams, then who is the one asleep?

TN: There is no singular person responsible for the city, its rooms, or even its inhabitants. We are all factories of dreaming, even when awake, and that constant production is what gives the city that sobriquet. Read more »

by Richard Farr

This is the first part of a two-part essay.

I got into political philosophy out of sheer puzzlement. Surely we ought to know how to run human communities by now? But political ideologies were like religions: everyone thought they knew what was true and everyone thought that everyone who disagreed with them was either evil or a fool. How did we find ourselves in this swamp of struggle and contradiction? Plato had got the enterprise of political philosophy off to a clean enough start, hadn’t he, all those centuries ago? Why so little agreement about absolutely anything? 

Let’s spend a moment with Plato, and let’s leave aside for now the worry that creeps like a sickness over every reader of the Republic at some point: given the Grand Guignol absurdity of its conclusions, what if the whole thing is actually a joke that we in our earnestness keep failing to get? What if we’re not reading a defense of the most extreme rationalist authoritarianism imaginable, but a parody of such a defense? And what if the joke is on Plato’s fellow philosophers especially, we being the ones most  likely to find the central idea flattering?

Taken instead at the usual face value, Plato says that everything will be hunky-dory in human affairs if only the right authorities are in authority. Mr. P. is not thinking of people with a college degree, or wonks with a loud presence on social. His much grander fantasy is for us to be ruled by a class of men and women who have created, perfected and mastered The Science of Human Flourishing. They will be bureaucrats of wisdom. They will know how life itself works; they will therefore be able to safely pilot (and will be motivated exclusively by the desire to safely pilot) this magnificent but temperamental vessel called the State.

Some note a chicken and egg problem here. If these ‘philosopher kings’ can emerge only from decades of training in the right ethikē, or moral character, but the only way to provide such an education is to bring them up in an appropriately run polis, and if the only people who could ever create such a polis are this very same group of olive-munching übermenschen, then, um … but let’s leave that aside too. The idea of a state run on rational principles, by rational people, is a good place to start. So we lesser philosophers should be able to work out the details, no? Read more »

by Steve Szilagyi

A curious part of getting old is seeing people you knew in life turned into bronze statues. You preserve a vivid impression of some laughing, breathing person; they disappear for a while; then they pop up again as a stolid, staring statue. The transition from flesh to effigy can be disquieting. Heroic idealization is out. Too many of today’s statues strain to show their subjects as ordinary people—mannequins on the brink of the uncanny valley. And just to make sure you don’t mistake them for anything grand or lofty, they are placed at or near ground level, so you can stare right into their cold, dead eyes. Where once a pedestal raised a figure into the air like a great, godly hand, many of today’s statues simply stand on the street like day laborers looking for work. The idea, I suppose, is to make them more like the rest of us—but really, what’s so great about the rest of us?

The question of who deserves a public statue creates argument—and even more so, the question of whose should be torn down. To set a figure above the crowd immediately raises people’s hackles. How dare you stand up there, staring down as if you were better than me? Yet some people are better than others, and Central Park’s Literary Walk reminds us of this without fuss. The statues of William Shakespeare, Sir Walter Scott, and Sojourner Truth stand on proper pedestals, so that you must raise your face to see them—and so become a child, and experience a child’s sense of awe.

Inviting selfies. For myself, I’m happy to acknowledge that Shakespeare, Scott, and Truth were better people than I. It’s a little harder to summon the same feeling when confronting statues of some contemporaries. There’s a pretty good statue of Willie Nelson in Austin. Set at a decently respectful height, the statue’s warm expression and relaxed pose invite selfies. Across town, Stevie Ray Vaughan cuts a stranger figure—stiff and off balance, as if uncertain whether he belongs in bronze at all. And in Seattle, there’s a grotesque representation of Jimi Hendrix, squatting just above the sidewalk, stroking his guitar. What will future generations make of this? Will they identify him as a cultural force, or simply see an open-mouthed wild man? Read more »

by Carol A Westbrook

What is the hardest thing about dieting, the reason that most dieters give up? They get hungry.

Wouldn’t it be great if there were a pill that would leave you satisfied after a diet meal without those hunger pangs? A medicine that would keep you on a diet and help you lose the weight you need to lose? Well, these medications are no longer a dream—they now exist. These are the GLP-1 drugs. These drugs are a potential lifesaver for people who are overweight or obese.

Why do we care about these GLP-1 drugs? Because we are fat. We hate being fat. And fat can be fatal. Four million people die each year as a result of obesity.

How fat are we? Almost three-quarters of adults in the US are overweight, including 40% who are frankly obese. [See note at end for definition of BMI, and how it relates to obese and overweight]. This epidemic of obesity is not just restricted to adults, According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), about 20% of children and adolescents aged 2-19 were obese in 2018. It’s not a toddler’s fault that he is overweight.  There must be something inherently wrong with our lifestyle that makes even innocent children eat too much food—or the wrong food.

It wasn’t always this way. Thinking back to my childhood in the 60’s, it was rare to have an obese child in the classroom who, sadly, became the butt of many jokes. Now, overweight is accepted as normal, in both children and in adults. Ancient paintings, tapestries and even Egyptian tomb carvings showed that throughout history and until recently, people maintained a normal weight, balancing their food intake with their needs. But during my lifetime there has been a major disruption of this equilibrium so that the balance has shifted and weight gain has become the norm. The worldwide obesity rate has nearly doubled since 1980. What has changed? Read more »

A kind of cherry tree, I believe, abloom last month in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol.

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by Bill Murray

1

Even if Ronald Reagan’s actual governance gave you fits, his invocation of that shining city on a hill stood daunting and immutable, so high, so mighty, so permanent. And yet our American decay has been so avoidable, so banal, so sudden.

Our American decline wasn’t born from calamity. It came not in crisis, not under fire, but amid an embarrassment of prosperity, beginning when the United States was the world’s only hyperpower.

Here’s the puzzle: America’s Cold War opponent, the Soviet Union, collapsed in 2001. Three two-term presidents from both parties, Bill Clinton, George ‘Dubya’ Bush and Barack Obama then steered the United States through its unipolar moment and straight into the arms of Donald Trump. How can that possibly be?

This hasn’t been the greatest generation. Okay Boomer?

•

Forty year olds today can scarcely remember the last Soviet leader, Gorbachev. He was an interesting figure (maybe Google him). At the beginning of the 1990s the system he fronted collapsed in an unceremonious face plant.

I visited the Soviet Union three times before it collapsed into history. Its disease was fascinating. Such was latter-day Soviet deprivation that you could lure any Moscow taxi to the curb by brandishing a Marlboro flip-top box.

Its driver exhibited unusual affinity for his windshield wipers—he’d bring them home with him every night. This wasn’t aberrant, or excessive. If he hadn’t, they’d have disappeared by morning. Levis jeans and pantyhose were currency.

The two or three Western standard hotels in both Moscow and Leningrad (soon renamed St. Petersburg) were cauldrons of incipient Capitalism, boiling over with every kind of dealmaking. Carpetbagging accountancies sent young men with fax machines to both cities, who taped their company names to the doors of hotel rooms and got to work. The room you hired might be across the hall from Coopers and Lybrand, or down the corridor from KPMG.

Alas, the accountants hadn’t ridden into town to arrest the collapse of ordinary Russians’ standards of living, or to help raise up the good people who lived there. But then, they never go anywhere to do that.

I remember one long night at the Astoria Hotel bar on St. Isaac’s Square in St. Petersburg, when an American man cancelled his credit card claiming it was stolen, then used it to buy rounds for the house all night. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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by Alizah Holstein

In my junior year of high school, I wrote and illustrated a children’s story. Its title was Spiderfish, and it featured a fish who was also a spider, but who thought he had to commit to being either one or the other and was consequently unhappy. To find out who he really was, Spiderfish had to descend to the bottom of the ocean, where he finally met other fish who, like him, were also spiders. It earned the praise of our creative writing teacher, a flaxen-haired, freckled woman who went by her first name, Beth. Beth taught while sitting in a circle with us, cross-legged on the classroom floor, and she was as enthusiastic as she was flexible. She was convinced Spiderfish was publishable, and I needed little convincing that she was right.

I soon saw that Maurice Sendak would be coming to Boston to give a talk at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, where my mother had recently begun working. That fall afternoon, I got on the Boston T, holding onto a pole with one hand while clutching two items in a bag under my other arm. Inside that bag: our family copy of Where The Wild Things Are and a 9-by-12-inch manila envelope. Inside that envelope: my stapled-together little story, which also happened to be the original—and only—copy, a hand-written letter to Mr. Sendak, and a stamped, self-addressed return envelope. At the Gardner, I stashed these items under my chair, and as Mr. Sendak took the podium, he began to reminisce about his childhood, describing the little books he and his brother wrote and illustrated as children, and how they earned their first money by offering these books door-to-door to their parents’ friends and neighbors.

The talk was followed by a book signing. My family’s dog-eared copy of Where the Wild Things Are gave me a suitable pretext for standing in line, a costume of sorts, as functional and as convincing as Max’s pointy ears and bushy tail. When I reached the table at which Mr. Sendak sat, he speedily signed my copy of his book. Lingering beyond my allotment, I dropped my manila envelope in front of him on the white tablecloth. He frowned at the sight of it.

I told him I was hoping he’d take a look at the book I had written.

He couldn’t do it, he said, shaking his head.

“Really?” I asked. I promised it was short, wouldn’t take much time.

He said he didn’t do that kind of thing. Read more »

Mulyana Effendi. Harmony Bright, in Jumping The Shadow, 2019.

Yarn, dacron, cable wire, plastic net.

More here and here.

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by David J. Lobina

Like almost everyone I know, I enjoy listening to music and going to live concerts. What’s more, once upon a time I used to place much importance on someone’s ability to perform at a concert. This was especially the case because I was listening to a lot of rap music in the mid-to-late 1990s and within that world anything that was live was deemed to trump anything that was recorded. Rap was all about free-styling in situ and trying things out in the big outdoors in order to get your props, as they say; it was clearly not about trying things out again and again in a studio until it all clicked. As a matter of fact, some famous rappers did not sound like in their recordings at live gigs, and that counted against them.[i] Performance on a stage was all that mattered; the rest was manipulative and hardly genuine.

But no more: I now think that live music is awkward to witness and recordings give a better idea of one’s true potential as an artist – a better account of one as an artist, that is.

There’s an interesting contrast to be had here between attending live music and attending live sports (recall the lonely footballer!). When you are watching a live sporting event, especially a professional sporting event, you want to see what players are capable of under pressure and against one another in that very moment.[ii] There is something rather engaging in witnessing pros performing at their very best and in competition, with something at stake, an aspect that is lacking in sporting exhibitions and the well-rehearsed bouts of professional wrestling, the latter all theatre with its mock combat, and both just uninteresting.[iii]

So-called rap battles can be competitive too, though most free-style raps are not really created ex tempore – some are performed for the first time in a battle, sometimes with a specific rival as target in mind – and thus the importance of the live element is somewhat reduced here.[iv] The live component is perhaps more important in other musical styles; jazz, we are often told (here and here, for instance), is not about perfection but improvisation, and this is all the more dramatic if it happens in front of an audience – it seems that jazz is all about being oneself during the creation of music, whatever comes out (naturally enough, the result is usually only of interest when it involves talented and experienced musicians).

I grant all that, but this is not what I have in mind when I say that attending live music is awkward. Read more »

Editor’s Note: OpenAI recently published a Preparedness Framework, which is “OpenAI’s approach to tracking and preparing for frontier capabilities that create new risks of severe harm.” We asked ChatGPT (itself developed by OpenAI, of course) to tell us what it thinks of the framework.

by ChatGPT o3

1.  What the framework tries to do

OpenAI positions the framework as its master playbook for “frontier‑model” safety. It:

• Selects the risks to track. Three Tracked Categories—Biological & Chemical, Cyber‑security, and AI Self‑Improvement—are judged to satisfy five criteria (plausible, measurable, severe, net‑new, and instantaneous/irremediable) OpenAI.

• Keeps an eye on emerging hazards. Five Research Categories (e.g. Long‑range Autonomy, Sand‑bagging, Nuclear/Radiological) are monitored until their threat models mature OpenAI.

• Measures capability. Every covered model is run through Scalable Evaluations (automated proxies) and, when needed, Deep Dives (expert red‑teaming, third‑party studies) OpenAI.

• Gates deployment behind safeguards. If tests show a model crosses a High capability threshold, release is blocked until safeguards “sufficiently minimize” the risk; for Critical thresholds, safeguards are required even during further training OpenAI.

• Runs an internal governance loop. A Safety Advisory Group (SAG) reviews evidence and recommends, but final go/no‑go decisions rest with “OpenAI Leadership”; the Board’s Safety & Security Committee may override OpenAI.

Appendices list illustrative safeguards—refusal training, usage monitoring, KYC, interpretability tools, rate‑limits, etc.—for malicious users, misaligned models, and security threats OpenAI. Read more »

A Small Universe of Suns

The suns are ringed by nebulae
which are no more than clouds
of gas and dust, collections
of atoms, as we all are. But,

in Its capricious way,
the Lord of everything
has now caused links of gravity
to appear as russet shoots
holding the suns in redhot conclaves,
and the nebulae as hovering clouds,
flat, seriously cirrus, veined and green,
looking as if they were, instead, leaves
as comfortable as hammocks
inviting the imagination
of a poet who has looked
and seen.

Jim Culleny, 06/22/24
Photo by Abbas Raza

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