by Brooks Riley

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by Mindy Clegg

This month’s post might be shorter than usual, as the semester kicks off next week. I do want to address a couple of things going into the final stretch of the election season. Some historians and scholars have long debated what matters most, the zeitgeist (or vibes as the kids would have it) or materialist view of historical change. But is it really either-or? Let’s take the upcoming election in November. Many have noticed that there has been a change in feeling these last few weeks. At least some of that is embedded in the material conditions happening in the world, such as improvements in the economy, strong job numbers, and rising wages. Stories that explicate the zeitgeist matter, but so do outcomes, as we can see with the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine story “Past Tense.” If there is a vibe change, it’s not just down to attitudes, but the material conditions in which we find ourselves. So, let’s look at the changing vibes of the election.

It’s important to keep in mind that humans love a good story. I would even argue (following the thinking of the late Sir Terry Pratchett) that our love of stories is what makes us human.

Stories can help us to better understand the deeply complicated world in which we find ourselves. A good set of stories can give us shared meaning and direction. It can cement ties between people and move us to make change for the better. The Harris-Walz campaign has seemingly harnessed the power of story in that manner. Both have a compelling background that most of us can connect with, grounded in both struggles and opportunities. They seem entirely relatable, human, approachable. Much like in the year 2000, many people embraced George W. Bush because some voters thought they’d like to have a beer at the local bar with him (despite Bush being someone in recovery from alcoholism-something also rather relatable). While Harris reflects an ambitious career-driven woman from a middle class background, Walz embodies strong mid-west dad vibes. We got some of that from their DNC speeches. Read more »

Chakaia Booker. Romantic Repulsive, 2019.

” The artist first emerged in the early 1990s, creating striking outdoor public sculptures made from discarded industrial materials, namely rubber tires, which she transformed through a laborious process of machine and physical labor, into sensual, tendril-filled, texture-rich sculptures. In 2000, she garnered international attention for It’s So Hard to Be Green (2000), a massive wall-hung tire sculpture featured in that year’s Whitney Biennial. After those early critical murmurs and rumblings, things got quieter, and for the majority of the past two decades Booker has plied her trade largely outside of the limelight.”

Until more recently.

More here, here, and here.

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by Richard Farr

I will use this column to defend myself against the accusation, first made by my surgical assistant Mr. Alan Turing, that I was negligent in the death of an individual under my medical care. Or, as one armchair prosecutor has said, that I am “a stereotypically British sentimentalist who thinks dogs are more human than people.” The story is an ugly one but the facts are straightforward.

It was about 3 AM on a winter’s night in the small town of ________ . The only other neurosurgeon in the area had become “too ill to travel home” while vacationing on Maui. (From her voice message I was immediately able to diagnose Margarita Syndrome, with possibly an enlarged Piña Colada.) Anyway I was the only sawbones available when the call came in: CODE BLUE, DOC. ROAD ACCIDENT. FOUR VICTIMS WITH HEAD INJURIES. WAKEY WAKEY. 

In my line of work you don’t shock easily, but I was about to have the most disturbing night of my life.

I should pause here to explain an important background detail. Turing, who had sent the message, was only moonlighting at the hospital. He was a quick learner for sure, if a bit of an oddball, and his daytime preoccupation (I hesitate to call it an occupation) was a Ph.D. in computational philosophy, whatever that is. He was competent enough; I only wished he wouldn’t keep urging me to read his draft material, which I found either impenetrably technical or else a jocose, badly written muddle. One particular essai of the latter kind turns out to be somewhat relevant to the ludicrous stand he has taken in the present matter. It begins with the arresting first sentence: I propose to consider the question, “Can machines think?” and progresses only pages later to the blithely contradictory The original question, “Can machines think?” I believe to be too meaningless to deserve discussion. (“Fascinating,” I said, hoping that was diplomatic enough.) Read more »

by Katalin Balog

It may be that we have become so feckless as a people that we no longer care how things do work, but only what kind of quick, easy outer impression they give. If so, there is little hope for our cities or probably for much else in our society. But I do not think this is so. —Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, 1961

(Apology)

There is a beautiful garden in a quiet tree-lined street in Manhattan’s Little Italy. There are rows of flower, lush, abundant and slightly wild, a stone balcony you can imagine Romeo climbing up to, stone balustrades, several lions, one with climbing vines adorning his face, a sphynx, various other statues, a copy of a Hermes medallion from the late antiquity, a fig tree and a hydrangea tree,  giant shady pear trees, and many small hidden paths that lead to gazebos and intimate garden spaces. People in the garden sit and while the time or read by a little table. In a very small space, Elizabeth Street Garden has been able to replicate the richness of life, spaciousness of spirit, the magnanimity and dedication to beauty of the best Italian gardens. It is one of the truly great places in NYC. But after 12 years of struggle between the city and garden advocates, on June 18, 2024, the New York State Court of Appeals ruled six to one that the City of New York could destroy it to build a mix of affordable housing, luxury retail and office space in its place. In a Hail Mary pass, Martine Scorsese, Robert de Niro and Patti Smith wrote their own letters to the Mayor, imploring him to, in Smith’s words, “grant a stay of execution of the Elizabeth Street Garden”.

The quirky, beautiful, art-filled space is the creation of long-time neighborhood denizen and outsider artist Allen Reiver who leased a blighted city-owned site in 1991 and filled it with greenery, architectural elements and neoclassical statuary from his own collection as an antique’s dealer. His son Joseph, who worked with his father on creating the Garden, and who is now its executive director, has kept it – with the help of an army of volunteers – open for all and busy with concerts, poetry readings, movie nights, art exhibits, performances, yoga and gardening. With 200,000 annual visitors and hordes of devoted neighborhood regulars, the Elizabeth Street Garden should be designated a New York Landmark. But instead, it is in a life and death struggle to survive.

One might wonder if the imperative to build more affordable housing just might outweigh the neighborhood’s sentimental attachment to this magical space. The call for bold action on housing in the city and in the country is amply justified. And yet… it is not true that we should build absolutely everywhere we possibly can. In a neighborhood and city that is steadily losing its edge and character, there is a case to be made that such decisions need to be tempered by sensitivity to the organic quality of life in a neighborhood, to what it is like to live or work here. Read more »

Before I Entered Time

I’m not blowing smoke, nor am I a sage.
It’s a simple condition:

The universe may as well not have been before;
in fact, “before” did not exist until I entered time.

There’s not one memory I can hang a word upon
before I entered time.

Before was just void, as blank as the sheet of this page
before something keyed this poem’s first “I”
at the beginning.

At this moment I’m somewhere around
“there’s not one memory”, (noted above)
and, by the time I get to “stop”, (likewise noted below),
will there be any words still worth saying,
any word still worth doing?

As I drift from time will there be anything
more than smoke of a doused fire curling up
cycling against gravity —something lighter than air?

But then, will the music stop?

Jim Culleny
8/14/19

by Eric Schenck

Now

It’s a strange thing when your parents get ready to sell your childhood home.

There’s a feeling of excitement at what’s to come. Something good and normal is happening, and after all, home is where you make it. There’s also a feeling of detachment. It doesn’t feel real, in a way, and you know life is about to be “before and after.”

But that’s what’s happening now. We are all going to the house, one final time, for “The Schenck Long Goodbye.”

It starts with a road trip. Noah picks me up at the Boise airport, and the next morning we drive all the way home. When we finally pull into the driveway, I expect the flashbacks, am ready for them.

And now that we’re here for one last hurrah, that’s exactly what starts to happen.

1996

Perhaps my earliest memory is one with my father. 

I’m sitting in the backyard and there are leaves all around me. It feels cold. I can see my dad’s big glasses. He’s laughing. 

Everything is comfort and security. 

Like so much of my childhood viewed as an adult, the memory is more a feeling than a thing. I don’t know exactly what we’re doing, but I know I’m safe. That’s enough.

The house sees this, just as it will see many things. Read more »

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 »