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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by Mike O’Brien

I take a long time read things. Especially books, which often have far too many pages. I recently finished an anthology of works by Soren Kierkegaard which I had been picking away at for the last two or three years. That’s not so long by my standards. But it had been sitting on various bookshelves of mine since the early 2000s, being purchased for an undergrad Existentialism class, and now I feel the deep relief of finally doing my assigned homework, twenty-odd years late. I think my comprehension of Kierkegaard’s work is better for having waited so long, as I doubt the subtler points of his thought would have had penetrated my younger brain. My older brain is softer, and less hurried.

While I chose this collection as an antidote to topicality and political news, my contemporary anxieties and concerns still found some purchase on these one-and-three-quarter-centuries-old essays of literary indulgence and Christian Existentialism. (Some say Kierkegaard was a proto-Existentialist, or a pseudo-Existentialist, but I don’t think there’s any reason to define such a profligate genre of philosophy so narrowly). As a critic of the press and “the present age”, of course, he has many sharp quips that occasion a smile and a nod, as if to say “you get me, Soren, and I get you”. But that’s the low-hanging fruit, the things that are obvious enough to state unequivocally, like the aphorisms of Nietzsche that sound snappy but do not by themselves reveal anything philosophically significant. The more philosophically meaty works of Kierkegaard’s are more contentious, harder to swallow (especially from a secular standpoint), and sometimes quite baffling on the first encounter (or second, or third).

Of particular interest was “The Sickness Unto Death”, published in 1849, in which he elaborates a spiritual psychology of despair (despair being “The Sickness”, and in the end identified with sin). Being perpetually worried about ecological issues, and about the political and economic conditions mediating humanity’s impact on the planet, despair is always hanging around. It used to be anxiety (another topic of Kierkegaard’s, particularly in 1844’s “The Concept of Anxiety”), when the data on climate change was looking worse and worse. Now that the consensus on global warming is so thick and so dire, the inherent openness of anxiety seems no longer apt to the situation (in Kierkegaard’s conception, anxiety is “the possibility of possibility”, among other formulations). You feel anxious about things that could happen, or things that could go badly. You feel despair about things that will happen, or will go badly. The accumulation of confirming data builds a great wall of probability that seems impenetrable by the merely possible, however desperately you might hold to the abstract truth that the possible still can happen. A despairing state of mind cannot sustain hope for possibility against the weight of probability. This is why Kierkegaard identified God as the only source of a possibility that could provide salvation from despair. I have a hard time seeing the difference between an impossibility which becomes actual through a miracle, and a possibility which is only possible through divine intervention. In either case, the secular situation remains hopeless. Read more »

by Derek Neal

The writer is the enemy in Robert Altman’s 1992 film, The Player. The person movie studios can’t do without, because they need scripts to make movies, but whom they also can’t stand, because writers are insufferable and insist upon unreasonable things, like being paid for their work and not having their stories changed beyond recognition. Griffin Mill, a movie executive played by Tim Robbins, is known as “the writer’s executive,” but a new executive, named Larry Levy and played by Peter Gallagher, threatens to usurp Mill partly by suggesting that writers are unnecessary. In a meeting introducing Levy to the studio’s team, he explains his idea:

I’ve yet to meet a writer who could change water into wine, and we have a tendency to treat them like that…A million, a million and a half for these scripts. It’s nuts. And I think avoidable…All I’m saying is I think there’s a lot of time and money to be saved if we came up with these stories on our own.

Writers are slow and they cost money. They get writer’s block. They miss deadlines. They are an impediment to efficiency and progress, and if they are ignored, they might get angry, as Mill finds out when he starts receiving threatening postcards from an anonymous scriptwriter that say things like, “I TOLD YOU MY IDEA AND YOU SAID YOU’D GET BACK TO ME. WELL?” and “YOU ARE THE WRITERS ENEMY! I HATE YOU.”

Writers may be Mill’s “long suit,” as a lawyer at a party tells him, but as Mill himself notes, he hears thousands of pitches a year, and he can only pick twelve. The perennial losers are bound to become resentful, disillusioned—even dangerous. After receiving one particularly disturbing postcard (IN THE NAME OF ALL WRITERS IM GOING TO KILL YOU!), Mill decides to go through his call logs to discover who could be sending him such messages. He thinks it must be a man named David Kahane, and after learning that he’s at a cinema in Pasadena, Mill drives out to meet him, hoping to placate him with a scriptwriting offer for a film that will likely never be made. Read more »

In the past year or so, I have started taking a lot of photos of the ground as I take my usual walk along the same route every day. This recent photo of the cobblestones of Franzensfeste, South Tyrol, showered with flower petals from nearby trees, is one of them.

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by Dick Edelstein

The visit by Pope Francis to Ireland in 2018 as part of the World Meeting of Families was important since it was the first one since the historic visit by Pope John Paul II in 1979, an event that drew around one and a quarter million people to a mass in Dublin’s Phoenix Park, the biggest crowd ever seen in the country, amounting to almost one-third of the population. Since then, religious feeling in Ireland had been on the wane, along with the Church’s authority over those who considered themselves Catholics, which was in a near-fatal slump. The Church was facing an uncertain future with the number of new seminarians dropping to record lows for several years.

Still, that visit in 2018 had generated certain expectations. First, a turnout of half a million people was expected in Phoenix Park, a figure that proved to be overestimated by around 400 percent. The actual turnout—some 130,000 people—was much smaller. However, that was nothing compared to the other expectation. On account of widespread cases of sexual molestation by clergy and a generalized public dissatisfaction over the failure of the church to recognise its history of abuse and make suitable reparations to the victims, many Irish people were expecting Pope Francis, given his reputation as a liberal, to issue a detailed and lengthy apology. In recent decades, public outrage about sexual abuse by clergy had been a worldwide occurrence, but the issue had special significance in Ireland, where the moral tone of the entire country since independence had been set by the Catholic church, despite its longstanding record of abuse.

Other factors affected Irish people’s expectations of a full apology from the Pope. One of these was the Magdalene laundries scandal. Throughout much of the twentieth century, thousands of Irish women had been incarcerated in Magdalene institutions, most of which were run by Catholic religious orders. The women were forced to work without pay or benefits. Despite the outrageous violation of the women’s human rights, the Irish government colluded with their detention and was complicit in their treatment. In 2011, a group called Justice for Magdalenes made a submission to the U.N. Committee Against Torture, arguing that the Irish government’s failure to deal with the abuse amounted to continuing degrading treatment in violation of the Convention Against Torture and that the state had failed to promptly investigate “a more than 70-year system of torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of women and girls in Ireland’s Magdalene laundries”.

The story of the Magdalene Laundries was still reverberating in the public consciousness when in March 2017 Ireland was shocked by the discovery that, between 1925 and 1961, the bodies of 796 babies and young children had been interred in the grounds of the Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, County Galway, many in a septic tank. Catherine Corless, the local historian who exposed the scandal, complained to Irish legislators that nothing had been done to exhume the bodies after her research came to light despite expressions of “shock and horror” from the Government and the President. Instead, the site had been returned to its original condition. As with the Magdalene scandal, the authorities initially showed unimaginable insensitivity and cruelty towards affected families.

Thus, when Pope Francis came to visit in August 2018, Irish people expected a full and sincere apology because of his reputation for sympathy towards a number of liberal causes, his commitment to the protection of vulnerable people, and on account of a series of special circumstances in Ireland. But surprisingly, no sufficiently firm apology was forthcoming. Read more »

by Rachel Robison-Greene

In my youth I used to play in the wooded area behind my parent’s house in a space that seemed, from the vantage point of a child, to be vast. Those areas exist now only in precious cloudy corners of my memory. In the external world, they have long been replaced by housing developments and strip malls. Then, rain or snow may have threatened to keep me indoors. Now the children are kept inside by fire season, when the air is toxic, the sun is some new color, and the nearby mountains disappear from view. “Fire season has always existed”, I am told, and some people believe it.

I was taught that the structure of the government of the United States would prevent any one branch from exerting tyrannical power over the people. Elected officials craft legislation and well-qualified, appointed judges protect against the tyranny of the majority. “Judges can’t stand in the way of the will of the President” and “this country has never been a democracy”, I am told, and some people believe it.

The political climate is changing faster than many of us can absorb, and we are left wandering the woods during fire season without any visible and reliable points of reference to guide us home. We can only hope that we leave the fog resembling the people we were when we entered it.  I find myself wondering which changes I’ll be willing to accept. Will I come to regard some of my values as relics of a bygone era and will I be forced into that position by a sheer will to survive? Is this change in myself something to be feared?

It is a painful but common feature of the human experience to be afraid of our own capacity for change. As Jean Paul Sartre puts the point, “if nothing compels me to save my life, nothing prevents me from precipitating myself into the abyss.” I may experience fear at the prospect that I may be pushed from the cliff, but I feel anguish at the possibility that, when I find myself at the cliff’s edge, I might jump. Perhaps more disturbingly, I might find myself changing in fundamental ways that I currently find unacceptable. Should I spend my time fearing that possibility? Read more »