Ripening elderberries outside my house.

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by Rebecca Baumgartner

Several years ago, I trudged through a baking hot evening in July to go to my first-ever tennis lesson, offered by my city’s Parks and Rec department. Against a background of lightning bugs, cicadas, and a lingering heat despite the lateness of the hour, I started to learn the basics of tennis. In my mid-30s.

“Do you play racquetball?” the coach asked me after watching a few of my swings.

“Um, I used to, a long time ago.”

“I can tell. You’re swinging like you’re playing racquetball.”

As it turned out, I kept on playing tennis like it was racquetball, had a great time, but eventually decided tennis was not the sport for me (not that I’d been that great at racquetball, either). I finished up the last session and haven’t played tennis since. However, the experience was enjoyable and incontrovertibly worthwhile.

I’m a serial learner and hobbyist. Maybe you’d call it being a dilettante. Over the past 20-odd years, I’ve tried my hand at painting, pickleball, chess, printmaking, rock climbing, fencing, water aerobics, crochet, table tennis, cross-stitch, lacrosse, and the violin. I’ve auditioned for plays despite my complete lack of a theater background, sang in community choirs, joined an improv troupe, and competed in a darts tournament. I’ve dabbled in photography and tried to build fluency in German based on a shaky foundation laid in college. I’ve tried to get competent at the piano based on sporadic lessons I took 25 years ago, an effort that was hampered by not having access to a piano for approximately 23 of those years. When my kid played basketball, I learned the rules by hunching over my computer and squinting at YouTube videos of old NBA games, trying to figure out what foul a player had committed. 

I’ve tried to understand how the brain works, how to read Old English, how to use HTML, and have made precisely one scrapbook. A random book on string theory and biographies of Mozart and Alan Turing expanded my understanding of topics I have no need to know. Most recently, I’ve read everything about Antarctica I can get my hands on, and am currently trying to learn as much as someone without a science degree can learn about radiation and nuclear power. 

Despite the randomness of these activities, and my lack of competence in more than a small number of them, all of these various projects have been enjoyable for their own sake, and all of them have introduced me to a discipline or community of practice that was previously completely unfamiliar to me.  Read more »

by Derek Neal

The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker is a novel about paying attention. After you read a chapter, you, too, begin paying attention to things you’ve never noticed before.

On my way to work this morning, gliding down quiet, leafy streets in my 2012 Mazda 3 GS-SKY, I noticed a new sign. It was planted in the soil around a tree that had been planted into the sidewalk. In certain cities, this would not have been possible. I’ve noticed that when a tree is planted into the sidewalk, there are three options when it comes to the block of cement that has been replaced by the tree. The most common choice, and the choice that my city has made, is to fill in the square with dirt or mulch.

This was why the sign could be planted there, because there was soft ground in which to insert the two metal rods that held the sign. Another choice is to cover the empty square with a grate. To my mind, this is the sensible choice. If you don’t cover the square, trash and cigarette butts will quickly fill in the square, which will be difficult to remove because you can’t simply sweep them up—the level of the dirt is not flush with the sidewalk, so a sort of divot is created in which trash can collect—instead, a city worker will be forced to pick up the trash with some sort of picking device, or they’ll have to maneuver a dust bin and broom into the square space around the tree, which must be difficult, considering that the dust bin and broom may not fit easily into the square. This is why the grate is the correct choice: it creates a flush seam with the surrounding sidewalk, prevents trash from collecting in the area around the tree, and makes cleaning easier. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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by Barry Goldman

Robert McDonnell was the Governor of Virginia in 2014 when the federal government indicted him and his wife on bribery charges. A Virginia businessman named Jonnie Williams provided the McDonnells with over $175,000 in “loans, gifts and other benefits.” In exchange, the Governor “arranged meetings, hosted events, and contacted other government officials” in an effort to advance the fortunes of Anatabloc, a nutritional supplement manufactured by Williams’ company.

Mr. and Mrs. McDonnell were convicted and sentenced to prison terms of two years and one year respectively. McDonnell appealed, and the Court of Appeals affirmed. He petitioned the Supreme Court, they granted certiorari, and we have the case of United States v. McDonnell.

I don’t want to be accused of spinning the facts here, so I’ll take my language directly from the Court’s decision. Here are two examples of the conduct at issue:

Governor McDonnell’s wife, Maureen McDonnell, offered to seat Williams next to the Governor at a political rally. Shortly before the event, Williams took Mrs. McDonnell on a shopping trip and bought her $20,000 worth of designer clothing. The McDonnells later had Williams over for dinner at the Governor’s Mansion, where they discussed research studies on Anatabloc.

At a subsequent meeting at the Governor’s Mansion, Mrs. McDonnell admired Williams’s Rolex and mentioned that she wanted to get one for Governor McDonnell. Williams asked if Mrs. McDonnell wanted him to purchase a Rolex for the Governor, and Mrs. McDonnell responded, “Yes, that would be nice.” Williams did so, and Mrs. McDonnell later gave the Rolex to Governor McDonnell as a Christmas present.

There is no dispute that McDonnell “arranged meetings, hosted events, and contacted other government officials” on behalf of Williams and Anatabloc. The question the court addressed was whether those were “official acts.” Here is more from the Court’s opinion:

[T]he federal bribery statute… makes it a crime for “a public official or person selected to be a public official, directly or indirectly, corruptly” to demand, seek, receive, accept, or agree “to receive or accept anything of value” in return for being “influenced in the performance of any official act.” An “official act” is defined as “any decision or action on any question, matter, cause, suit, proceeding or controversy, which may at any time be pending, or which may by law be brought before any public official, in such official’s official capacity, or in such official’s place of trust or profit.”

So let’s review. Williams wants to see universities in Virginia conduct trials of Anatabloc so he can get FDA approval to market it as a drug. He takes the Governor’s wife out and buys her $20,000 worth of clothes and a Rolex. The Governor invites him to the Mansion and also invites top health officials from his administration and executives from Virginia universities involved in drug research. What do you think is happening? Read more »

Sughra Raza. Remains of The Day. Oolloo House, Vermont, August 2024.

Digital photograph.

“Found in backyards as well as forests across the eastern United States, the flowering dogwood feeds dozens of other fruit-loving bird species, along with foxes, skunks, beavers and black bears. Its berries are also high in calcium, and the calcium in its leaves nourishes land snails that songbirds such as wood thrush eat. ”

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by Rachel Robison-Greene

When people think about what it is to live a successful life, they often think about finding a good job that pays a respectable salary, meeting and making a commitment to a life partner, having children, buying a house, and affording the luxuries that financial success makes possible.  Some view success as a zero-sum game; I can only have more if you have less.  Success, on this model, is not just keeping up with, but surpassing the Joneses.  The Effective Altruism movement has encouraged people to think about success differently.  Instead of measuring it by the wealth one accrues, we should instead measure the success of a person’s life by looking at how much good they do.

The Effective Altruist (EA) movement was motivated in no small part by Peter Singer’s 1971 paper, Famine, Affluence, and Morality in which he argues that each of us ought to be doing very much more for the global poor than we are currently doing.  The premises of his argument remain true today—most of us do not give a substantial amount of our income to the world’s most impactful charities.

Since its inception in the early 2000’s, the EA movement has energized young people searching for a source of meaning in their lives.  To many, it was clear that a life spent in pursuit of a larger and larger bank account balance would always be full of things but lacking in substance.  It was equally clear that some problems cause more suffering than others, suffering matters, and that the most meaningful life would involve eradicating as much suffering as possible.

In the intervening years, EA has graduated from college classrooms to Silicon Valley and the pages of top newspapers.  If money is needed to solve the globe’s most serious problems, converting top earners to the movement is a promising strategy.  In 2023, billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of cryptocurrency exchange FTX, was convicted of fraud, conspiracy, and money laundering.  News coverage surrounding the issue revealed that Bankman-Fried was an Effective Altruist and gave large amounts of money to charity.

Since this news became widely known, attitudes toward EA have shifted, even in academic departments.  Read more »

by Malcolm Murray

The battle lines are drawn. AI safety is fighting a battle on three fronts.

The figure shows how the AI safety viewpoint is opposed to three others, on two dimensions. First, let’s define the axes. The debate over advanced AI and its risks and benefits has many dimensions, but here we focus on two of the most important: timeframe – short-term vs long-term and risk appetite – high vs low. Timeframe is self-explanatory, but we should note that long-term here doesn’t mean the very long term measured in decades and centuries, just anything beyond the short cycles elsewhere – the quarterly earnings cycles of corporations, the valuation cycles of startups and the election cycles of politicians. Risk appetite means the level of risk one is willing to take to receive benefits. A high risk appetite means one is willing to take a large amount of risk to receive rewards, while a low risk appetite means a more risk-balanced approach, where one is willing to take a moderate amount of risk to receive the same level of rewards.

Using these two axes, we can distinguish four distinct AI viewpoints. I call these viewpoints rather than camps or groups, since several quadrants have multiple groups which may not fully agree with each other, and there is also overlap between the quadrants. The figure also contains just one prominent example for each quadrant, there are many others that could be plotted.

Let’s then turn to AI safety and the three battle lines. The AI safety viewpoint is in the top right corner, with a long time horizon and a low risk appetite. This can be loosely defined as the view that advanced AI, while bringing significant benefits to society, also poses significant new, and enhanced risks. It does not hold that all risk is bad and society should not make any progress, but rather that progress should be risk-balanced, taking into account the benefits, and weighing them against the risks. The three battle lines are with the opposing viewpoints in the other three quadrants.

The battle lines vary in their level of conflict. A year or two ago, the temperature ran highest in the battle over timeframe between the risk-cautious viewpoints. Read more »

Getting to Know You

I’m getting to know you. You who came
with the first Archaeon’s spark

Everything was new then, even you, you
parenthetical tail of vital events, you
old telegraphic protoplasmic stop, you
callous caboose bringing up the ends of trains
of eloquent clauses, small words, grunts
and final remains, you little, but lethal,
punctuational dot.

You came on the scene with the first cell-knots waiting,
you loomed in the dark as first hearts began beating,
in celebrations of birth you took orchestra seating,
at wakes you confirmed your ruthless deleting.

Never kind to lovers you bathed the earth in shade
two-stepping with light —its dissembling side:
what it made you unmade
…………………………………….. It Comes!
—alarms went out when your hacking heralds came through
making it clear you’d come to snuff anything new:

alone in your shadow lovers wept
…… embracing only the smoke they’d kept
………… of the flame you’d smothered before you left

by Jim Culleny
10/7/13

by David Winner

Is it like that first moment when you touch certain parts of yourself as a child and find pleasure in it?  Or that first drink, that first cigarette?

Now that I’d determined that the shooting was staged, what other realities could I question? All my life I could have rejected political outcomes that bothered me—Reagan in 1980, Trump in 2016, and both Bushes in between.  Cowardly Vice Presidents had certified those results.  The Republicans had brought out their dead to vote along with the help of their Ukrainian/Russian/Venezuelan/Cuban allies.  They’d fucked with voting machines.

Like the opiate epidemic but maybe even more free ranging, conspiraboids are lighting up in people’s brains all over the world.  Ukrainians are really Nazis. Rohingya are recent invaders of Myanmar.  Moslems aren’t really Indians.  Illegal alien rapists and murderers are descending upon the southern border of the United States. Read more »

by Eric Feigenbaum

I noticed around the time I turned 30, conversations at parties and get-togethers inevitably turned toward real estate: how much homes cost in which neighborhood, who people know who had bought a house – and how. There was an innate understanding that financial success was tied into owning a home and in a city like Los Angeles where I live, getting into a house is no easy feat.

The house with a white picket fence has always been the symbol of the American Dream. Especially in the postwar era, Americans prided themselves on an upwardly mobile middle class who could own at least a small piece of their country.

American homeownership peaked in 2004 at 69.4 percent and today hovers at around 65 percent which is still favorable to the entire 1960s when homeownership was around 63 percent.

Imagine a country with 90 percent homeownership. Imagine what it would mean to have a society with that rate of homeownership – with that high a level of security and wealth accumulation.

That’s exactly what Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s founding Prime Minister did. Although educated in economics and law at University, Lee Kuan Yew noticed as a child the differences between neighborhoods dominated by homeownership versus those that were mostly rented. Cleanliness, stability and low crime rates were among the benefits of an owned neighborhood.

In 1965 when Singapore declared its independence both from the Malaysian Federation from which it was ejected and from the United Kingdom from which it was being decolonized, Singapore had a roughly 27 percent homeownership rate. Shockingly low.

Why? Read more »

by Rafaël Newman

Around ten years ago—before the physical and cognitive decline that began during the pandemic; before his removal from autonomy to a care home in the north end of Montreal; before his death there at the beginning of this month—my father entrusted me with his personal collection of jokes.

As he approached his eighties, the decade of their lives in which both of his parents had died, dad had begun to feel increasingly elegiac, a mode not easily compatible with his professional role as a raconteur. Indeed, by his own account, his narrative powers generally—upon which he had relied, during his career as a novelist, poet, and professor of creative writing—were on the wane. “I feel like I no longer have a story to tell,” he said during a visit I made to his apartment in 2013: and thus, a fortiori, he must also no longer be a teller of jokes.

The Word file my father mailed me, ten years ago, from his PC in Montreal’s Mile End to my MacBook in Zurich’s sixth district, is some 250 pages long and counts almost 122,000 words. It comprises between 700 and 900 jokes—it’s difficult to give a precise tally, since some of the entries are of shaggy-dog length, while others are multipart variations on a theme: spoof ad campaigns for Viagra, mock letters to Dear Abby, ostensibly alien words that turn out simply to be the phonetic rendering of “redneck” pronunciations. There are cameos by all the types familiar from the commedia dell’arte of Golden Age American stand-up: St. Peter; various “blondes” and Mothers Superior; talking parrots; bartenders; “Irishmen”; and, of course, The Lord Almighty Himself, in His aspect as begrudging distributor of attributes to tardy recipients.

What is notably absent from my dad’s jokes, however, is anything that might properly be termed a dad joke. This may be because “dad jokes” typically arise ad hoc, out of a particular real-world context, and are thus less suitable for isolated transcription and transmission than more generic, self-enclosed, typologically defined anecdotes. Or perhaps it is due to the fact that, according to my own observations, the typical dad joke is not sexist, not racist, not violent—and therefore not conventionally funny, since humor derives its explosive force, in psychoanalytic interpretation, from its ability to release otherwise shameful aggression in a socially acceptable fashion. Dad jokes also often feature—indeed, are often centrally built around—puns, which are likelier to elicit groans than laughter; and my dad, for all his professional attention to the concrete effects and semantic vagaries of language, typically grew impatient at what seemed a fetishistic dwelling on the phonemic or even lexical surface of words. What interested him, when telling a joke, was getting a laugh. Read more »

by Akim Reinhardt

Here’s what a bubble looks like.

I walk into the local convenience store, and next to the two ATMs is a third machine selling Bitcoin. You can slide a bank card into the ATMs and get cash. You can slide your credit or debit card into the third machine and buy a Bitcoin, or a percentage of one if you can’t afford to shell out roughly $65,000 for a whole one.

But you know what you can’t do? Turnaround and use your brand new bitcoin to buy anything in the convenience store where you purchased the bitcoin.

There’s a machine in the store that will sell you money that you can’t use to buy anything in the store.

I’m tempted to say this is my Bernard Baruch moment. The famous apocryphal story is that Baruch realized it was time to get out of the stock market, just ahead of the 1929 crash, when a shoeshine boy tried to give him a hot stock tip. When everyone wants to get in, it’s time to get out.

But this can’t be my Bernard Baruch moment because Baruch made a fortune on the market before it crashed, while I’ve always steered clear of Bitcoin, never having had faith that it, or other block chain currencies, would prove to be anything but a game of musical chairs speculation. I can’t get out if I never got in. Instead, the convenience store Bitcoin machine was just a moment of confirmation. Perhaps something like, it’s been years since you believed in Santa Claus, and then one Christmas Eve you happen to catch daddy drinking the milk and eating the cookies.

Recently, we may have seen less Baruchian sign that yet another bubble is near popping: Donald Trump’s Cult of Personality. It certainly feels like something has changed over the last month. Read more »

Wall with trees painted on it with a window showing real trees in Klausen, South Tyrol.

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by Monte Davis

Climate change first came to many Americans’ attention in June, 1988. James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, testified to the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources that the signal of long-term warming from increasing CO2 in the atmosphere had emerged unmistakably from the noise of year-to-year variation in weather.

Four of the warmest years on record had come earlier in the 1980s, and 1988 would be another. One wildfire after another had begun to spread in Yellowstone Park. As that summer advanced, what would be a historically severe and costly three-year-drought took hold in most of the United States.

How long had this moment been coming?  The unmatched resource for answers is Spenser R. Weart’s superb 2003 book The Discovery of Global Warming, and its greatly expanded, steadily updated, richly linked hypertext version online.

In 1824, Joseph Fourier reasoned quialitatively that the atmosphere must let the sun’s visible light in more readily to warm the earth than it lets that warmth out as infrared radiation.

In 1859, Joseph Tyndall identified water vapor and carbon dioxide, CO₂, as the most important components that absorbed — “trapped” — and re-radiated downward some of the infrared energy.

In 1896, a century into the industrial revolution and its hunger for fossil fuels, Svante Arrhenius calculated very roughly that a 50% increase in CO₂ would warm the planet on average by 5° to 6° C. The good news is that his estimate was almost four times too high.  The bad news is that the next century of the Industrial Revolution – and more coal and more oil and gas, and population growth – blew out all expectations. Arrhenius speculated such an increase would take many centuries, but we will reach it in 2026. And keep going. Read more »