by Derek Neal

Alberto Moravia’s 1960 novel Boredom begins and ends with the narrator, Dino, describing his relationship to external reality. He does this, in the first instance, by describing a drinking glass, and in the second instance, by describing a tree. Here are Dino’s thoughts in the prologue:

“The feeling of boredom originates for me in a sense of the absurdity of a reality which is insufficient, or anyhow unable, to convince me of its own effective existence. For example, I may be looking with some degree of attentiveness at a tumbler. As long as I say to myself that this tumbler is a glass or metal vessel made for the purpose of putting liquid into it and carrying it to one’s lips without upsetting it—as long as I am able to represent the tumbler to myself in a convincing manner—so long shall I feel that I have some sort of a relationship with it, a relationship close enough to make me believe in its existence and also, on a subordinate level, in my own. But once the tumbler withers away and loses its vitality in the manner I have described, or, in other words, reveals itself to me as something foreign, something with which I have no relationship, once it appears to me as an absurd object—then from that very absurdity springs boredom, which when all is said and done is simply a kind of incommunicability and the incapacity to disengage oneself from it. But this boredom, in turn, would not cause me to suffer so much if I did not know that, although I myself have no relationship with the tumbler, such a relationship might perhaps be possible, that is, because the tumbler exists in some unknown paradise in which objects do not for one moment cease to be objects. For me, therefore, boredom, is not only the inability to escape from myself but is also the consciousness that theoretically I might be able to disengage myself from it, thanks to a miracle of some sort.” [emphasis mine]

And here is Dino in the epilogue:

“As I have said, I spent hours gazing at the tree, to the great surprise of the nuns and the servants in the hospital, who said they had never seen a quieter patient than me. In reality I was not quiet, merely I was closely occupied with the only thing that truly interested me at that moment, the contemplation of the tree. I had no thoughts, I simply wondered when and how I had recognized the reality of the tree, had recognized, in other words, its existence as an object which was different from myself, had no relationship with me, and yet was there and could not be ignored. Evidently something had occurred just at the moment when I hurled myself off the road in my car; something which, to put it plainly, might be described as the collapse of an insupportable ambition. I now contemplated the tree with infinite complacency, as though to feel it different from myself and independent of me were the only thing that gave me pleasure…” [emphasis mine]

The change that occurs in the novel is one of consciousness. Read more »

Karachi sunset: A sea of houses between me and the ocean and the sun.

by Joseph Shieber

In a recent talk at the Santa Fe Institute, the software engineer and tech startup founder Jason Crawford, who has in the last few years devoted his time to the Roots of Progress nonprofit, offered suggestions for developing institutions capable of fostering the acceleration of scientific progress.

Crawford framed the discussion around three questions: “When (if ever) has science accelerated in the past? Is it still accelerating now? And what can we learn from that?”

On the first question, whether science has accelerated in the past, Crawford offers an unequivocal “yes,” noting, in a whirlwind history, that

In the ancient and medieval world, we had only a handful of sciences: astronomy, geometry, some number theory, some optics, some anatomy

In the centuries after the Scientific Revolution (roughly 1500s–1700s), we got the heliocentric theory, the laws of motion, the theory of gravitation, the beginnings of chemistry, the discovery of the cell, better theories of optics

In the 1800s, things really got going, and we got electromagnetism, the atomic theory, the theory of evolution, the germ theory

In the 1900s things continued strong, with nuclear physics, quantum physics, relativity, molecular biology, and genetics

Though Crawford’s survey of the historical trends is brief, he is undoubtedly correct (and has much more to say about the historical record of progress on the blog for his nonprofit, The Roots of Progress). Just to underscore the point, it would be worth it to look at a few measures highlighting the acceleration of science. Read more »

by Terese Svoboda

The year 1909 was the first time George H. Cove vanished. He claimed he was kidnapped and threatened with death if he continued developing his patent on solar panels. One story has it that an investor arranged the kidnapping to discredit him, and that instead of death, he was offered a furnished house and $25,000 (almost a million dollars in today’s money) if he would cease promotion of his solar panels. Newspapers went crazy and he was subsequently accused of arranging the kidnapping as a publicity stunt. But Cove already had plenty of publicity, one would say too much, newspapers lauding his efforts and investors pouring money into his work.

The police dismissed the kidnapping as a hoax. Were they paid off? His rivals, Edison, Westinghouse, and Standard Oil, were notorious in stamping out competition. All three were known to use extreme measures to protect their market share. Cove had been fronted (framed?) by Elmer Burlingame, who issued stock he did not own in Cove’s Sun Electric Generator Company. When this was revealed, investors went sour. In 1911, after raising $160 million in today’s money, his company declared bankruptcy. Cove was arrested for stock fraud and went to jail for a year. Perhaps he should have gone into stealth mode.

“Given two days’ sun, it will store sufficient electrical energy to light an ordinary house for a week” was Cove’s pitch.While his solar panels didn’t generate much electricity in comparison with Westinghouse and Edison’s inventions, he’d invented something much more important,  the photovoltaic generator, that is, a way to get electricity directly from the sun. He did not understand how the solar panel worked, but neither did anybody else at the time. This technology would not be investigated again until the 1950s at Bell Labs, and then with silicon rather than the simpler version that Cove stumbled on. Read more »

by Angela Starita

Before I’d seen “Barbie,” my sister told me she’d liked it but hated the last scene, which she went on to describe. Oblivious to the concept of “spoiler alerts,” she spoke with considerable disgust about the lunacy of a doll who lived in a perfect world of clothes, sparkling beaches, and dance parties choosing to become a human woman. It didn’t make sense. And of all places to end this witty homage to MGM technicolor—a gynecologist’s office?! Such a disappointment, and utterly illogical. Mysterious even.

This was the tenor of her review, minor outrage on the part of a doll we’d both loved. Even though we’re eight years apart in age, we’d played with some of the same dolls when I had inherited hers, a brown-haired Barbie with a bouffant and a Francie doll, her small-breasted friend who sported a blond flip do. I got the white carrying case too and whatever clothes Jeanette had collected. Under my tenure, the Barbie world grew exponentially and entered the 1970s. I made a town for her in the space under the steps going into our basement. Its central feature was the three-story town house where my main doll, Malibu Barbie, a blond with a deep tan, lived. The others had various apartments around town and the gang would travel around the country in Barbie’s camper. I wasn’t allowed to have a Ken doll, so if a romantic plot line ensued, another Barbie would temporarily take the trouser role for a heated make-out scene.

When I did finally see the movie, I found it surprisingly moving, tearing up when Barbie realizes she has to leave Barbieland, that in fact, she’s stopped being a doll. I suppose that when she chose to end the movie at a doctor’s office, Greta Gerwig had in mind the start of adolescence and the painful end of childhood. But I also wonder if she had remembered a late scene in The Bell Jar when Esther gets fitted for a diaphragm. It’s a moment of power for a character who for much of the book feels utterly defenseless. For me, at least, the final scene of Barbie had much the same tone, the melancholy of saying goodbye.

So why my sister’s strong reaction to this moment of female manifestation? I’m torn between two theories, though I’d guess the answer is some combination. Read more »

by Jeroen Bouterse

On November 22^nd, a far-right party received almost a quarter of the vote in the Dutch national elections, making it by far the largest of the fifteen parties elected to our new Parliament. Whether it will actually get to govern depends on its capacity to form a coalition, but what is certain is that it will take 37 out of 150 seats in the legislature this week; twelve more than the second-largest party.

International media reporting on this landslide all noted what the party and its leader Geert Wilders represented over the last decades: his aggressive attacks on Islam and his slurs on minorities with Islamic country backgrounds, his softness on Putin’s Russia, his resistance to climate measures, and his calls for a ‘Nexit’, to name a few. While Dutch media and (to-be) opposition parties have certainly not ignored these points, they barely played a role in the campaign, and in the initial domestic interpretation of Wilders’ victory.

In that interpretation, the vote for Wilders has to be understood as an anti-establishment vote: the result of general dissatisfaction with a centrist coalition failing to address the problems of the people. The far right won not because of its promises to close mosques, arrange “fewer Moroccans”, cut support to Ukraine, withdraw from the Paris agreement and quit the EU, but more or less in spite of those promises; it won, rather, because of social issues such as a persistent housing crisis.

I will push back against this interpretation later, because I believe it lets the voter off the hook too easily. Aspects of it are clearly true, however. Read more »

by Rafaël Newman

When I was eleven years old, Eva Kornpointner, my mother’s mother—our Grossmutti, as we were taught to call her—took me, together with all five of her other grandchildren, on a trip up the Rhine. Our ultimate, trans-Rhenish objective, after we had crossed the Swiss border at Basel, was Zurich and its hinterland, where Grossmutti had been born in 1906 into a family of German immigrants to Switzerland; along the way we visited other sites of personal importance to her in Germany, such as Munich, where she briefly attended university in the 1930s and where our grandfather had been born, and Coburg, in Upper Franconia, where her ancestors, according to family legend, had helped to build the famous castle. We were confounded by the enormous, filthy Cologne Cathedral, admired the more congenial Mainzer Dom, and goggled at the “devil’s footprint” in the Münchner Frauenkirche, the legendary vestige of a metaphysical architectural dispute. (Churches figured prominently on Grossmutti’s itinerary: surprising, given her lifelong commitment to atheism and progressive politics, but inextricable from German history.)

In Switzerland, Grossmutti took us on a tour of the city of Bern, where we played chess with life-sized pieces on an outdoor board in the Rosengarten, Napoleon’s vantage point upon briefly occupying Switzerland, and sniffed wonderingly at what seemed to be chocolate-scented vapors emanating from manhole covers in the Altstadt. When we did finally arrive in Zurich we were treated to homemade plum tart by Fee Meyer, our mothers’ cousin and one of our last remaining local relatives. Fee also escorted us on a hike up the Uetliberg and a visit to the neighboring town of Rapperswil, the home of her aging mother, our great-aunt Käthe, Grossmutti’s eldest sister. Tante Käthe (whom her wizened aspect and lack of English, together with whispered family legend, had conspired to give a forbidding aura) had spent the war years in Germany, having returned to the family’s homeland in the 1930s along with one of her brothers; this latter had then stayed on, in what was to become East Germany, while Käthe and her daughter Fee made their way back to Switzerland in the late 1940s. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Marie Snyder

Will re-branding Covid help people start acting to protect themselves from it? Maybe we need an ad campaign to kick-start public health. Outside of judicial rulings and before marketing, we had religious leaders to remind us to the best ways to survive, and before that we had stories passed down for generations to help keep children safe from harm by altering their behaviour, like this one: 

“Our parents told us that if we went out without a hat, the northern lights are going to take your head off and use it as a soccer ball. We used to be so scared!”

Unfortunately, those types of stories are unlikely to work on media-savvy kids today. They also seem immune to stories about going out without a mask, and being cautioned that the invisible microbes are going to infect your brain and body until you can’t get out of bed anymore. They’re not scared at all. 

Except that one is true. 

We don’t need to live in fear, but we do need a healthy wariness of the dangers of frostbite, drowning, cars, and pathogens. We train our kids to be careful near the road and near water. We watch out for them. Unfortunately, we’ve largely stopped doing that with pathogens, and children are paying the price. 

We might think that stories of monsters won’t work, yet advertising is still able to convince us to want things we didn’t know existed five minutes ago. We need to market the virus differently.  Read more »

by Gus Mitchell

In Henry VI, Shakespeare seems to have coined the expression “heart’s content.” The phrasemaking of King Henry is telling: “Her grace in speech”, he says of his Queen, “makes me from wondering, fall to weeping joys. / Such is the fulness of my heart’s content.”

Juxtaposing “wondering” to the joyous “fullness” of “content”, he describes the process of joy as an escaping of the potentially infinite vagaries of thinking; it is held in the intuitive knowing of the heart. To feel content, then, is to rejoice in a feeling of fulness beyond the need for further words, for further inputs or outputs, a fulness which depends, implicitly, on the felt presence of a pre-inscribed limit –– a container –– beyond which no more wanting or needing is possible.

Content derives from the Latin contentus (contained; satisfied) and continere (to hold together/enclose) – from the root com (with, together) and tenere (to hold). Content is a noun, a verb, an adjective, but common to all of these is the sense of something held, kept together, contained. It is a symptom of our inverted times that content has now means something radically alien. Content as an attainable feeling vanishes as the content of the internet proliferates.

Google “What is Content?” and you will encounter an infinitude of web pages explaining the concept of content marketing; the indispensability of superior content for your brand; how to use content strategically, on and on. The word itself is a blank: “Most businesses already engage in content marketing in some form by creating consumable content that is published on a public platform to generate brand awareness.” Read more »

by William Benzon

That title reads like I have doubts about the current state of affairs in the world of artificial intelligence. And I do – who doesn’t? – but explicating that analogy is tricky, so I fear I’ll have to leave our hapless captain hanging while I set some conceptual equipment in place.

First, I am going to take quick look at how I responded to GPT-3 back in 2020. Then I talk about programs and language, who understands what, and present some Steven Pinker’s reservations about large language models (LLMs) and correlative beliefs in their prepotency. Next, I explain the whaling analogy (six paragraphs worth) followed by my observations on some of the more imaginative ideas of Geoffrey Hinton and Ilya Sutskever. I return to whaling for the conclusion: “we’re on a Nantucket sleighride.” All of us.

This is going to take a while. Perhaps you should gnaw on some hardtack, draw a mug of grog, and light a whale oil lamp to ease the strain on your eyes.

What I Said in 2020: Here be Dragons

GPT-3 was released on June 11 for limited beta testing. I didn’t have access myself, but I was able to play around with it a bit through a friend, Phil Mohun. I was impressed. Here’s how I began paper I wrote at the time:

GPT-3 is a significant achievement.

But I fear the community that has created it may, like other communities have done before – machine translation in the mid-1960s, symbolic computing in the mid-1980s, triumphantly walk over the edge of a cliff and find itself standing proudly in mid-air.

This is not necessary and certainly not inevitable.

A great deal has been written about GPTs and transformers more generally, both in the technical literature and in commentary of various levels of sophistication. I have read only a small portion of this. But nothing I have read indicates any interest in the nature of language or mind. Interest seems relegated to the GPT engine itself. And yet the product of that engine, a language model, is opaque. I believe that, if we are to move to a level of accomplishment beyond what has been exhibited to date, we must understand what that engine is doing so that we may gain control over it. We must think about the nature of language and of the mind.

I still believe that. Read more »

A majestic Black Kite outside the 5th floor window of a hotel in Karachi.

by Bill Murray

Petro Oliynik wore a flag draped around his shoulders like a cape and didn’t speak. If it wasn’t an act, it was at least a presentation. You don’t often meet a man as unusual as Petro Oliynyk and the truth is, I haven’t really met him either. Maybe better to say I once accompanied him on his daily rounds.

Oliynik’s legend describes him as a simple stallholder in a market in Lviv who was drawn in the pursuit of democracy to the Maidan in Kyiv’s 2014 Revolution of Dignity. In the noble pursuit of righteousness, the story goes, he found his calling at a mansion outside Kyiv, and never left.

Four years ago Petro Oliynyk escorted three of us on a tour through that building north of Kyiv, popularly known as the Honka House. They call it that because the contractor was a Finnish builder of log homes called Honka, but that’s not why you tour it. You tour it because it’s a monument to inveterate corruption and bad taste – to everything Ukraine has been trying to leave behind.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a real human tragedy, doubly so because of where Kyiv was headed. I visited Kyiv twice these last ten years, in 2013 and 2019, and the differences between the first and second trips tell a story. Read more »

by Nils Peterson

I went to graduate school at Rutgers in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Rutgers had a fine University Chorus that sang one concert a year with a New York Orchestra at Carnegie Hall and one concert a year with the Philadelphia Orchestra. Though my scholarly friends scoffed at such a waste of time, I had the chance to sing with some of the great conductors, Eric Leinsdorf, for instance, and, of course, Eugene Ormandy.

My last semester in New Jersey, we sang the Brahms German Requiem with the Philadelphia Orchestra. It was a transcendent thrill. I had loved the piece as a listener, but now I had the chance to go so deeply inside it as a singer (and spend a long weekend in Philadelphia to boot). Not long after our last performance, I got married and set out across country for California and my first full-time teaching job at San Jose State, not yet a university. The year was 1963.

I arrived in San Jose dead broke. My wife and I had money for one night in a hotel (all night long, the same noisy cars circled round and round) and then we had to find a place to rent the next day or we would have had to use part of our month-in-advance rent money. Incredibly, we found a cottage on a rich man’s estate overlooking the valley. We were allowed to use the swimming pool in the yard. The one in his living room was for his family alone. We had also gotten our first credit card, a Bank America one with a $200 limit. (Well, my pay was $6,600 a year.)  We maxed it out on a $195 hi-fi set.

I found that I enjoyed teaching even though I had three sections of composition. My fourth class was a survey of English Literature. Originally, I was scheduled to have 4 composition classes, but the new head of the department took pity on me and split one of the senior professor’s class. In gratitude, I think I tried to squeeze a graduate seminar into each class, but the students seemed to like it and me.

One November morning, bright and shiny like the November morning I’m typing this in, I walked out of my English Lit class to the news that President Kennedy had been shot. Read more »

by Shadab Zeest Hashmi

Masjid Al Aqsa, or The Far Mosque of Jerusalem, as the Quran calls it, is emblematic of the spirit of compassion and transcendence for Mevlana Rumi. “A heart sanctuary,” in the words of Rumi in his poem “The Far Mosque,” Al Aqsa represents a conquest over the egoistical desires of dominance, greed, vanity, violence and supremacy. It is held together by the sacred energy of merciful love, even “the carpet bows to the broom/the door knocker and the door swing together/like musicians.”

There is an expansiveness in Rumi’s poem that mirrors the place. I recall the embrace of the silent hours as I sat on the russet prayer carpets of Al Aqsa a few years ago– the wide doors, stained-glass windows, voices of children braided with the rhythmic recitation of the Qura’n, the scrawny birds covered in holy dust, stones sculpted by mythic time. I also recall stepping out of one of the fifteen gates of Al Aqsa, into a scene from a war movie, IDF soldiers with guns in all the storied alleys, and all the thresholds of sacred sites.

Jerusalem is no heart sanctuary. It is “the bitterness of two hundred winter-bare olive trees fallen/in the distance,” as a line from a poem by the Palestinian-American poet Deema Shehabi says. Her poem “In the Dome of the Rock” haunts me; it reflects the soul of Palestine, the soul of Al Aqsa, the guardian that has given this site of ascension its very blood. Shehabi continues with the unforgettable persona: “her exhausted/scars will gleam across her overly kissed forehead. She will ask you to come closer, and when you do,/ she will lift the sea of her arms from the furls/ of her chest and say: this is the dim sky I have/ loved ever since I was a child.” Read more »