Rain streaking on the window of an Icelandair Boeing 737 aircraft on its takeoff roll for a flight from Reykjavic to Boston about a month ago.

by Bill Benzon

When European colonists and used West African tribesmen and their descendants as slaves, they had no intention of learning anything from them or of adopting their ways.  Their intention was simply to secure a source of cheap and tractable labor. But they were struck by the musicality of their slaves.  And that musicality was to have a profound influence on their descendents and, in time, on peoples around the world. Let’s take a quick look at some moments in this centuries-long process of miscegenation, mutation, and cultural transmogrification.

Ecstatic Religion

Early in the seventeenth century, at about the same time Jamestown was being settled, Richard Jobson, an English sea captain, went to Africa and subsequently wrote that “no people on the earth [are] more naturally affected to the sound of musicke than these people.” A century and a half later, the Rev. Samuel Davies heard slaves in Virginia and remarked that the “Negroes above all the Human Species that I ever knew have an Ear for Musick, and a kind of extatic Delight in Psalmody.”

Published in 1640, The Bay Psalm Book was the first full-length book published in the English-speaking colonies, thus illustrating the importance that religious song had for the colonists. Singing schools—a 3 or 4 month series of meetings in which people learned to sing hymns—were held throughout the colonies. Meanwhile, as the slaves grew in number, they held festivals grounded in African custom, such as the ‘Lection Day festivals held in New England during which the slaves elected their own governors or kings, and the legendary Congo Square meetings in New Orleans. Read more »

by Bill Murray

In my exuberance after a spring trip to Kenya, Tanzania and Zambia, I proclaimed Africa the world’s greatest travel destination. It’s only fair to defend my thesis, for surely others will disagree.

First let’s dispense with the ‘Africa is not a country’ technicality by defining the travel to Africa that I have in mind as being, wherever the location, by some measure more raw, or relatively less mediated than a trip to most places in Europe or Asia.

What I have in mind for my ‘Africa’ is a place that affords a frontline opportunity for real experience of real life. Simple as that. In so much of Europe and much of Asia, what you’ve come to see and do is mediated by reservations, ticket punchers, tour guides, maîtres d’ and so on, putting the experiencer at some separation from the experience — the food in sought-after restaurants, the remnants of the Colosseum or Hadrian’s Wall or Stonehenge, cultural events like bullfights in Madrid, Japanese Sumo wrestling or the changing of various guards before various palaces from Beijing to Stockholm to the Kremlin. These are all surely there, but they are presented to you.

The simple elegance of Spanish tapas, the majesty of the Duomo, the magnificence of a Rodin in Paris, a van Gogh in Amsterdam or a David in Florence, come with a visitor’s expectations of a place because of its usually well-deserved reputation. The Bwindi Impenetrable Forest in southern Uganda comes with no such burned-in reputation, and it will utterly amaze you. Read more »

by Steven Gimbel and Gwydion Suilebhan

From the late 1960s to the mid 1980s, America was beset by a haunting array of serial killers: the Zodiac Killer, the Son of Sam, John Wayne Gacy, Ted Bundy, and the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, who just recently died in prison. For two dark decades, serial killers stalked the country, eroding our collective sense of safety and casting disturbed shadows over a world that made less and less sense every day.

In the 1990s, serial killers started to give way to mass shooters, who have terrorized Americans with increasing frequency for the past 30 years. Today, instead of protracted investigations that take years to find their targets (and in some cases never do), we have rotating 24-hour news cycles full of AR 15-wielding villains. Killers who used to operate for years, murdering victims in methodical patterns, have been replaced by death-cultists who kill the same number of people (or more) in one bloody event.

Serial killers defy easy understanding. In their horrific acts, they embody human immorality and insanity, but by eluding the authorities for months or even years, they demonstrate patience and discipline. They seem to be both malevolent and (in some ways) civilized.

Somewhere deep inside, we all want to believe that serial killers are impossible. Anyone smart enough to evade capture, write a manifesto, or plan elaborate rituals shouldn’t also be able to commit gruesome, inhuman acts. They remind us that our understanding of humanity is incomplete (at best) and perhaps quite flawed. Read more »

by Tim Sommers

I try to keep callbacks to a minimum in my columns here, but this one seems worth it. Be warned, though. It’s well into the weeds we go.

Last month, right here, I posted this piece.

“Are Counterfeit People the Most Dangerous Artifacts in Human History?”

It was a counter to Daniel Dennett’s recent piece in The Atlantic, “The Problem with Counterfeit People.”

As I wrote later in an email to Dennett, “I really only wanted to make two points in the article. (1) I worry that framing the issue as being about ‘counterfeit’ people deflects from the fact that, in my humble opinion, all the real harms [you cite] don’t require anything like ‘real’ AI – and they are mostly already here. (2) Probably, I am wrong (a lot of people seem to think so), but I also thought it was a weird way for you to frame the issue as I thought the intentional stance didn’t leave as much room as more conventional thinking about the mind for there to be a real/fake distinction.”

Much to my surprise our illustrious Webmaster S. Abbas Raza, who is a friend of Dennett’s, passed the piece along to him.

Dennett initially responded by forwarding a few links. I thought, surely, that is worth sharing. So, here they are.

“Two models of AI oversight – and how things could go deeply wrong” by Gary Marcus.

(Marcus features in my previous piece “Artificial General What?”)

He also sent this https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/08/tech/ai-image-detection/index.html, and this

“Language Evolution and Direct vs Indirect Symbol Grounding,” by Steven Harnad.

Later Dennett wrote, “The main point I should have made in response to your piece…is that LLMs aren’t persons, lacking higher order desires (see ‘conditions of personhood’) and hence are dangerous. There is no reason to trust them for instance but few will be able to resist. They are high tech memes that can evolve independently of any human control.”

I thought it would be fun to have my friend and colleague Farhan Lakhany, who is something of an expert on Dennett’s work and philosophy of mind in general, take an objective look at the exchange. Lakhany just successfully defended his Ph.D, Representing Qualia: An Epistemic Path out of the Hard Problem at the University of Iowa so I thought it would be great to have him agree with me that I am right. He did not. Here’s what he said. Read more »

Whatcham’callit

She’s dead, he said.
So’s he, said she.

Kicked the bucket, he said.
Bought the farm, said she.

Under the clover, he said.
Crossed over, said she.

Iced with a heater, he said.
Sleeps with the fishes, said she.

Taken for a little ride, he said.
Gone to the other side, said she.

Flat-lined, he said.
Out of mind, said she.

To a better place, he said?
By heaven’s grace, said she.

Under the sod, he said.
To be with God, said she.

To Paradise? he said.
Would be nice, said she.

Could it be? he said.
Could it not? said she.

Jim Culleny;  © 7/14/2007

by Joseph Carter Milholland

Lately, I have been thinking about the failures behind my most recent relationships: what led to the breakup but really what caused them not to begin at all. I have been wondering why I am always left with the feeling that the contact between the two of us never became more than surface level, and often not even that. As I wrestle with this sad fact, I have, as a form of fantasy and consolation, been thinking again and again of a scenario in which another person could know the real me. 

In my imagined scenario, another person would shadow me for 24 hours – at least 24 hours, in my wilder imaginings maybe as much as a week. They would not interact with me, except for perhaps the occasional commentary or clarification as to what I was doing. They would see when I woke up, what and how I ate, how I worked, what I did with my spare time, the way I would take naps for 11 minutes and 35 seconds in the late afternoon, how I would take long walks in the evening listening to music, how I would make dinner while listening to a podcast or Youtube video, and then eat it while watching a documentary or disposable television show, how I would, during my workday, constantly refresh my podcast app and Youtube subscription to see if anything new had popped up, how I would also check the news in certain conflict zones to see if there had been an escalation, how I would read a poem each morning as soon as I woke up and often right before bed, how I would sometimes read a poem during breaks while at work but not as much as I wanted to, how I would have absolutely no set time as to when I ate, sometimes not eating anything until 5 or 6 or later, other times eating so much granola in the morning that the protein overlead would make the idea of eating unthinkable for 12 hours or more, how when I do my laundry, I take my pants out of the dryer ten minutes into a hot cycle and then hang them up semi-damp to remove the wrinkles without needing to iron them, how I make endless lists – lists of music I want to listen to, authors I want to read, books others have recommended, poems and short stories I recommend to others – and yet I am seemingly incapable of scheduling my day. They would see the sum of me, the sum of my most prized habits which I refrain from showing to anyone outside myself, the parts of me I admire or detest or am indifferent or resigned to but which are somehow opaque to others. 

There is something narcissistic about this fantasy, but more significantly, it’s completely unrealistic. An observer necessarily changes the behavior of the person who is observed. If I was being watched during all my waking hours, I would fundamentally not be the same person I am when I am alone. Most importantly of all, who would consent to such a strange ritual? Read more »

Akram Dost Baloch. From the exhibition “Identities”, 2020.

More here and here.

by Eric Bies

There may be no concept so alluring in all of science fiction than that of time travel. We are undoubtedly drawn to alien species and places in space—moons to colonize, asteroids to mine. But even freakish beings and far-off worlds, however remote, have always smacked a little too much of our own reality. I’m fully capable, after all, of walking from my apartment to the park. I can sit on a bench and read National Geographic. What I can’t do (and have an immensely difficult time imagining ever being able to do, so that the notion borders on fantasy) is step outside and arrive at yesterday.

And yet how many of us wish we could!

The more melancholy among us, given to regret, get stuck in the mud of wishing just that. (And the reasons, from finance to romance, could occupy an entire essay of their own.) But how many of us at the same time wish to know, for the sheer fun of finding out, whether Jesus Christ had curly hair or straight? (My bet is he was bald.) Yes, who else but we the hopelessly curious can be depended on to investigate, if one day someone does invent a time machine, who Jack the Ripper was, whether there ever was a warrior-king called Odysseus, and what Cleopatra and T-Rexes really looked like?

Here’s another mission: Go back to 1880, clap a beard on your face, stump down to the British Library, and ask one of the assistants to judge whether the name of John Ruskin, the most eminent English writer then living, will remain recognizable to readers in the year 2020. Of course, this is something like surmising today Brad Pitt’s popularity in 2160: if we wish to know, it’s because we can’t, and so we ask: Does one future grow any less certain the more certain than others it seems? Is there some universal law that invites expectation only to subvert it? Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Claire Chambers

Rebecca F. Kuang’s new novel Yellowface, a hilarious and haunting satire about the publishing industry, is proving a literary fiction bestseller this summer. However, it is her previous book Babel, or the Necessity of Violence that interests me here. Whereas Yellowface concerns contemporary America, Babel is a capacious piece of speculative fiction mostly set in Oxford during the 1830s. It was published in the Covid-19 pandemic under the young author’s abbreviated first name, and was a surprise hit due in part to its popularity on BookTok. As I will discuss, the novel deals with issues of language, translation, and colonialism in a startlingly original way.

Protagonist Robin Swift had been born in Canton and given a Chinese name that is never disclosed. After his mother’s death in the so-called Asiatic Cholera pandemic of the late 1820s, a professor called Richard Lovell becomes his guardian for reasons initially unknown. Lovell allows the boy to choose his own name (he decides on ‘Robin’ for the bird, and ‘Swift’ from Gulliver’s Travels) before bringing him to England.

Lovell prepares Robin for admission at the prestigious Royal Institute of Translation at Oxford, known to students as Babel. Compared with the classist and white supremacist patriarchy of the rest of Oxford University in that period at least, Babel is multilingual, multicultural, and even admits girls. Here Robin makes three friends: Ramy from Calcutta, Haitian Victoire, and the English rose Letty. In the institute’s intensive language programme, the teenagers’ friendship too quickly becomes intense. Ramy, Victoire, and Robin still feel a complex loyalty to the (quasi-)colonized homelands they had to leave behind. Cracks start to emerge in their relationship with Letty, who holds sympathy for the British civilizing mission. Read more »

by Ed Simon

I am condemned to be free. —Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness

Well, I wish I could be like a bird in the sky,
how sweet it would be if I found I could fly,
Oh, I’d soar to the sun and look down at the sea,
and then I’d sing ’cause I’d know, yeah,
I’d know how it feels
I’d know how it feels to be free. —Nina Simone, “I Wish I Knew How to be Free”

First mixing the grounds of red and yellow ocher with water so as to make a viscus, sticky gum which she puts between her cheek and whatever teeth she may have had, the woman placed her rough, calloused, weather-beaten, sun-chapped hand against the nubbly surface of the limestone cave’s wall, and then perhaps using a hollow-reed picked from the silty banks of the Rammang-rammang River she would blow that inky substance through her straw, leaving the shadow of a perfect outline. This happened around forty thousand years ago and her hand is still there. A little over two dozen of these tracings in white and red are all over the cave wall. What she looked like, where she was born, whether she had a partner or children, what gods she prayed to and what she requested will forever be unknown, but her fingers are slim and tapered and impossible to distinguish from those of any modern human. “It may seem something of a gamble to try to get close to the thought processes that guided these people,” writes archeologist Jean Clottes in What is Paleolithic Art?: Cave Paintings and the Dawn of Human Creativity. “They are so remote from us.” Today a ladder must be pushed against the surface of the cave’s exterior, which appears as if a dark mouth over the humid, muddy Indonesian rice fields of South Sulawesi Island, so as to climb inside and examine her compositions, but during the Neolithic perhaps they simply cleaved alongside the rock face with their hands and feet. Several other paintings are in the complex; among the earliest figurative compositions ever rendered, some of the sleek, aquiline, red hog deer, others of chimerical therianthropes that are part human and part animal. Beautiful, obviously, and evocative, enigmatic, enchanting, but those handprints are mysterious and moving in a different way, a tangible statement of identity, of a woman who despite the enormity of all of that which we can never understand about her, still made this piece forty millennia ago that let us know she was here, that she lived. Read more »

My wife and her mother walking in the mountains near Meransen, South Tyrol.

by Ethan Seavey

“Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains.” —Jean-Jacques Rousseau (some guy who wound up as the father of French philosophy)

How much you can divide this sentence into similarly incorrect phrases?

[Man is born free and everywhere he is.] “Everywhere” is incorrect because the idea of a man is extremely limited to the societal sphere in which he lives. The American white man is gendered so differently from the French white man. The American white man is also different from his neighbor who is Black, his neighbor who is gay, and his neighbor who is white but born into poverty. They are all Men and they experience that differently. Any attempt to define what a man is by social attributes alone is futile because it will always exclude people who identify as men.

[Man is born free] is incorrect because they are subjected to forces more powerful than them which force them into labor and strip freedoms.

[Man is born] is incorrect because Man is made. Consider: a baby is born into a world. A doctor inspects the baby’s genitalia. The doctor decides which sex the baby will be labeled. In some cases, the doctor will modify the baby’s body to ensure that they will fit into one of two options. Then the baby is not a baby. He is a baby boy; she is a baby girl. In that order. He is a To-Be-Man; she is a To-Be-Woman. The troubling part is that every person is labeled a To-Be-Something before they have the opportunity to decide what they are, or what that even means for them.

The position of being a Young Man or a Young Woman may be the first time that the person has the opportunity for choice. With the independence to explore their connection to their gender for the first time, it can be exciting. For cisgender, heterosexual people, it’s a euphoric moment of being recognized as you truly want to be.

For queer people, this euphoria does not come with being recognized as a Man or Woman. The very opposite is true, leading to what I’d call Gender Insecurity. In my own experience, I found that Gender Insecurity transformed into two different manifestations, fighting within myself. Read more »