by Derek Neal

Some weeks ago I made a note to myself on my phone:

Describe the artistic encounter—the aesthetic experience, its effect on the reader

I made this note because I wanted to try something different in my writing. In most of my essays, without ever articulating this idea to myself, I’ve attempted to understand and interpret a text or a film, and I’ve tried to present this to the reader. Here is what the text means, I say. Here is what the movie means. I have figured it out and now I am showing it to you as evidence of my intellect. This is the correct reading of the novel, the proper explanation. I am right; other people are probably wrong. When I write in this way, I often efface myself linguistically, giving my writing the semblance of objectivity while also positioning myself as an authority on a given subject—but I’m not sure I want to write like this anymore.

In describing the artistic encounter or the aesthetic experience, which I’m contrasting with the above description, the text or the film is no longer understood as a whole, autonomous object but as one unfinished half that must be completed by the reader or the viewer. Rather than a dead thing it becomes a living being animated by the recipient. The film that I watch is not the film that you watch because I am not you and you are not me. In my previous understanding, the art object was a sort of safe that needed to be unlocked through a series of interpretative moves, allowing its secrets to be revealed. In this new understanding, the safe is more like one of those little libraries you see on people’s lawns; it’s always open and you can find treasures inside, but you can and should also put your own things inside to help create the library. If you don’t, something is missing. The art object is incomplete without the reader or the viewer.

I’m not sure how I came to this new idea, although I have some vague notions. It may partly be a result of engaging with art that is impossible to interpret. I’m thinking in particular of the films of Andrei Tarkovsky, which I’ve attempted to write about here and here. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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by Barry Goldman

One day many years ago my wife got stuck in the shower. She doesn’t know exactly how it happened, but that’s the gist. She finished taking a shower, pushed on the door to get out, and it wouldn’t open. She jiggled the door, and she banged on the door, and she pushed on the door, and she wiggled the door, and the door would not open.

So she stopped and thought about it. She couldn’t climb over the door. She couldn’t go around the door, and she couldn’t go through the door. She was standing in the shower naked and wet, and she couldn’t get out. Now what?

So she started over. She jiggled and shook and banged. No result. Could she dismantle the door? She didn’t have any tools. She had a washcloth, a bar of soap and a bottle of shampoo, nothing she could use to dismantle a shower door. Could she get help? She could yell, but it’s not likely anyone would hear her. She could call someone if she had a phone, but she didn’t have a phone. She was in the shower.

Okay, this is getting serious. She pushed the door some more. She shook the door. She banged on the door. This is not amusing anymore. Pretty soon she’s going to have to take some serious measures. But what would those be?

She could launch herself at the door and try to smash through it. Maybe that would work. It’s not generally a good idea to crash through a glass door naked, but if it’s necessary it’s necessary. Even then, they probably make those doors so they’re not easy to break. Susan only goes about 100 pounds. It’s not clear she could bust through a glass shower door even if she tried.

Okay, now she’s getting cold. She could warm up by turning the shower back on, but then what? She is beginning to run out of options. Pretty soon the situation is going to turn desperate. And when it turns desperate, then what? Read more »

by Rachel Robison-Greene

These days, there is a common unpleasant routine in the lives of well-informed, civic-minded individuals.  They wake up in the morning, check the news, and are immediately bombarded with stories about events in the world that elicit strong negative emotions such as grief, fear, helplessness, and anger.  In such disturbing times, it seems as if a person’s mental health cannot be maintained under the trauma assault to which they are subjected daily.  It is unreasonable to suggest that we all simply feel different emotions than those that we feel—what we feel in a given moment is not something that can be consciously controlled.  That said, though we may not be able to change the emotions themselves, it might be possible for us to change the emotional climate we occupy; we could feel fewer negative emotions simply by consuming less news.  Is this something a responsible citizen can do?  Is it a defensible form of anger management?  Is anger an appropriate response to injustice, or ought we to try to banish it from our emotional repertoire?

The ancient Stoics maintained that anger is a destructive emotion that gets in the way of the thing that is actually important and, in a meaningful way, up to us: the cultivation of virtue.  In his treatise, On Anger, Seneca writes,

Some of the wisest of men have in consequence of this called anger a short madness: for it is equally devoid of self-control, regardless of decorum, forgetful of kinship, obstinately engrossed in whatever it begins to do, deaf to reason and advice, excited by trifling causes, awkward at perceiving what is true and just, and very like a falling rock which breaks itself to pieces upon the very thing which it crushes.

In her book Anger and Forgiveness, the philosopher Martha Nussbaum also advises that we ought to avoid anger. She argues that anger is almost always normatively incoherent.  She sees it as backward-looking insofar as it encourages the person who lingers in it to focus on some past perceived harm.  She argues further that anger frequently involves a payback wish—a strong desire for the person who has done wrong to compensate for the harm they’ve done.  Read more »

Sughra Raza. Found “Imaginary Being” (after Jorge Luis Borges). March 2025.

Digital photograph.

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by Malcolm Murray

By 2030, we will have countries of geniuses in data centers, but we won’t know what to do with them.

In my 10+ years as a Superforecaster, I have picked up many techniques and lessons regarding forecasting. Given the fractured state of the debate on Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and AI progress, it seems useful to apply these Superforecaster lessons to the debate.

AI is a rich topic and of course contains many parallel debates, but one of the most heated (and most interesting) is regarding the expected continued speed of progress. That debate can probably be boiled down to the question of whether people are “feeling the AGI” or not. A phrase coined or at least popularized by Ilya Sutskever while at OpenAI, “feeling the AGI” has become a shorthand for a set of arguments saying that advanced AI will transform the world within a few years. This is the viewpoint of the people in the AI labs, for sure. See e.g. the statements from the leaders of the three leading AI labs – Sam Altman says “We are now confident we know how to build AGI”, Dario Amodei says “I think [powerful AI] could come as early as 2026”, and Demis Hassabis says “I think we’re probably three to five years away [from AGI]”. You can also find the frenzied AGI heads on X that greet every AI development with a collective genuflection of “AGI is near!”

In the other camp, you have the AGI naysayers, who for various reasons all believe that AI will not transform the world, or at least not in the near future, or without significant additional technological breakthroughs. Gary Marcus is a leading voice in this camp, other prominent members include Fei-Fei Li and Yann LeCun. The recent AI Paris Summit also showed that many politicians fall into this camp, from Macron seeing the summit as solely an investment opportunity to Vance’s speech downplaying any transformative effects AI might have.

We can try to make sense of this debate using some of the Superforecaster techniques and approaches. The first thing we need to do is to formulate the question more precisely. This is often one of the key reasons why people disagree, or debates get unresolved – a lack of precision in the question being discussed. This is very clearly the case with “feeling the AGI”. Read more »

by Rafaël Newman

This year marks the 80th anniversary of the end of the Third Reich, and thus of the industrialized mass murder known as the Holocaust, or Shoah—although 1945 was not the end, according to Timothy Snyder, of World War Two. That conflict, the historian maintains, was pursued by the otherwise victorious imperial powers in their respective independence-minded colonies, and only concluded with those powers’ defeat and withdrawal, or with the substitution of some variety of “post-colonial” economic system (The Commonwealth, La francophonie) for classic empire. To say nothing of the “mercantilist neo-imperialism” currently looming.

In any case, eight decades after 1945, there are fewer and fewer survivors of the Nazi regime still alive—a recent publication, urgently entitled Bevor Erinnerung Geschichte wird (“Before memory becomes history,” 2022), contains interviews with a remaining handful of eyewitnesses to the Shoah. Today, with well-publicized settlements (or at least public investigations) of notorious thefts by the Third Reich such as those involving the “Nazi gold” transports, “dormant” bank accounts, and the Bührle Art Collection in Zurich, literary commemoration of the period has begun to turn from lived human suffering to what has been (or might have been) left to succeeding generations: to what has been materially bequeathed, in distinction from the traumatic psychological legacy of second and third-generation survivors. Increased attention is being paid to the physical estates of the victims of terror and genocide; to the belongings that were stolen from them, lost, or destroyed; to the property that individual members of targeted populations were obliged to leave behind, to sell for a pittance, or to have forcibly auctioned off. As if, having dealt comprehensively with the Third Reich’s violations of the Sixth Commandment—“Thou shalt not kill”—we have moved on to a reckoning with its infringements of the Eighth—“Thou shalt not steal.” Is any form of individual compensation, of making-good-again still possible, now that the physical and mental suffering of the victims has been largely acknowledged, their deaths publicly mourned? What would a literary performance of the acknowledgment of theft, and reparations for it, look like? Read more »

by Charles Siegel

We are barely two months into the second Trump administration, and already certain themes are beginning to feel stale. One of them is that “it’s impossible to keep up with everything.” “The jaw-dropping outrages just keep coming, day after day.” The idea that it’s all a deliberate effort to bludgeon us – political opponents, nonprofits, lawyers who represent political opponents or nonprofits, judges, us – into a feeling of helplessness and thus submission. Everything everywhere all at once. Even the feeling of being bludgeoned is beginning to curdle.

There are indeed outrages every day. But the main thing now happening every day is the wrecking of the federal government. Another few thousand federal workers are fired, or another federal agency is shuttered, all in the name of ending “waste, fraud, and abuse.” It’s virtually impossible now for any administration spokesperson to say anything without intoning these four magic words.

When the government, or DOGE, or some combination of the two began firing tens of thousands of “probationary” workers in February, White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly said that “President Trump is rooting out the vast waste, fraud and abuse across the Executive Branch. He will deliver on the American people’s mandate to effectively steward taxpayer dollars, which includes removing probationary employees who are not mission–critical.” On February 11^th, with Elon Musk and his son looking on in the Oval Office, Trump said that “we” have already found “billions and billions of dollars in waste, fraud and abuse.” Even the Voice of America has gotten the treatment: the new director of the United States Agency for Global Media (which oversees VOA), Kari Lake, apparently appointed to oversee the near-total destruction of her own agency, stated last weekend that “waste, fraud and abuse run rampant in this agency and American taxpayers shouldn’t have to fund it.”

As mantras go, it’s undeniably an effective one. Who doesn’t want to eliminate wasteful spending? Or spending driven by fraudulent conduct? Or spending resulting from “abuse,” whatever that means exactly? And who doesn’t believe, or really just know in their bones, that “government” is inefficient, bureaucratic, sclerotic? Read more »

by Hari Balasubramanian

I’ve spent twenty-five years in a branch of applied mathematics called operations research; I’ve published papers and taught graduate engineering courses on probability, statistics, and optimization. But even with so much exposure to numbers and quantitative reasoning, I’ve never felt comfortable with math. That might sound like false modesty but it’s not: it’s the truth!

It’s been like this for as long as I can remember. In high school, I dreaded questions where different-colored marbles were drawn randomly from opaque jars. Derivatives and integrals in college courses were equally incomprehensible: I did them mechanically, through rote learning, not knowing why they were being calculated or what they meant. These days I am more familiar with notation, but it’s still not easy. Papers in my field are so crowded with sets and subsets, exponents and logarithms, theorems and lemmas, that I tend to give up very quickly.

My academic colleagues, friends, and some of my students, in contrast, seem far more comfortable. They walk through notation like they are reading prose and seem to grasp ideas much faster than I do. This leads to comical situations where I end up nodding sagely in meetings where somebody is explaining an algorithm or an equation, even when I am not getting it. This nodding reflex, I realize, hides certain fears: the fear of accepting to others how little one knows, or the fear of interrupting a conversation with too many naive clarifications.

Mathematica, a recent book by David Bessis (not to be confused with the software of the same name!), spoke directly to my experience. I finally understood why I feel the way I do. Bessis is a mathematician and I was a bit apprehensive about starting the book. But from the very first pages, I was drawn to his engaging and sincere tone. It felt like a conversation. Anyone, especially those who fear math, can draw solace and inspiration from the book. Indeed, the content is so unusual at times – there’s advice on how to remember one’s dreams, visualize the details of a room from a different vantage point (the ceiling, for instance), and discover our latent ability to echolocate – that it can feel quite tangential to its main theme. But that is precisely the point. Mathematics is not what it appears to be. Read more »

by David Winner

Unusual circumstances have given me an odd relationship with bodies, with nakedness.  My father wouldn’t have been caught dead at a nude beach and would have been utterly perplexed if anyone described him as a nudist but tended to walk around the top floor of our Charlottesville home with his lower half exposed.  Which only made me all the more modest about my own body until a coop lottery landed me in a nudist dorm at Oberlin College where suddenly boy and girl bodies were staring me in the face. Decades later, in my thirties, my friend, Louis Lucca, started driving me out to Jersey to the gay end of Sandy Hook’s nude beach where all sort of young, old, ugly, pretty physiques presented themselves to me.

But this writing is also about a very different body, a very old woman’s, that of my Great Aunt Dorle, who died in 2002 at 101.

I remember her old fashioned New York accent, right out of 1930’s movies. I remember the tiny grey hairs that peeked out from her upper lip, the few remaining teeth, the halitosis that was comforting in its familiarity, in its organic assurance that she was still with us. But I also recall her body. When those we love near the ends of their lives, sometimes we encounter their physical selves. My father’s was unfortunately already all too familiar, but I can’t forget his small, pale, wrinkled buttocks peering out from hospital gowns, nor my father-in-law’s thin haggard form in only underpants, and Dorle’s long, thin breasts springing like arms from her torso when I would undress her for bed.

When I was a child, Dorle was in her seventies and hardly seemed old. A publicist, a record producer, a thrower of enormous cocktail parties, she only seemed to age when her husband, Dario, died in 1980. Having recently been introduced to death – my two grandfathers and now Dario – I began to think that Dorle’s might be in the wings, but by the time of the memorial concert for Dario six months later, she’d rebounded, comforting a weeping Leonard Bernstein but back to being unflappable herself. Read more »

Plastic rose among a pile of assorted trash at the side of a road in Brixen, South Tyrol.

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by Akim Reinhardt

Medieval historians hate it, don’tcha know, when people talk about the Dark Ages. Scholars haven’t used the term in decades, eschewing it as an unfair and inaccurate description of 500–1000 years of European history, give or take. The Middle Ages weren’t just filth, poverty, violence, and ignorance, historians protest. They were actually a series of eras that featured the development of many knowledges and cultural innovations!

As someone who studies and teaches Native American history, I’m like: Hold my beer. You wanna talk about historical misperceptions unfairly miscasting regions and peoples as backwards, impoverished, and violent? You can’t even imagine. The Indigenous Americas featured numerous wealthy, art-laden empires. Large, orderly, planned Indigenous cities made even early modern European cities seem the filthy, disease-ridden, shambolic wreck by comparison. And all of it erased from popular historical memory so that in the aftermath of violent invasion, the colonial consciousness can be eased with lies about primitive savages.

But whether histories are erased and ignored, like those of Indigenous empires, or studied to the point of saturation, like much of European history, the truth is we can only imagine the past. We can never relive it. Even if it is recent and filmed, we can never be there, we can never participate. And even if we were there, even if we did participate and remember, memories aren’t as real as we think; they are reconstructions. Not merely subjective, memories are also limited and faulty.

And thus, the past always has at least one thing in common with the future. It must be imagined.

Was this time and place a dark age? Is a dark age coming? Look forward or back, we cannot know for sure. And anyway, what do we mean by “dark age.” Perhaps something about pervasive ignorance, the corruption of truth, and great difficulties in overcoming fallacies? Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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