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NEW POSTS BELOW
Jessica Flanigan in The Conversation:
Taylor Swift isn’t just a billionaire songwriter and performer. She’s also a philosopher.
As a Swiftie and a philosopher, I’ve found that this claim surprises Swifties and philosophers alike. But once her fans learn a bit more about philosophy – and philosophers learn a bit more about Swift’s work – both groups can appreciate her songwriting in new ways.
When one of the greatest philosophers, Socrates, famously said, “The unexamined life is not worth living,” he was arguing that people cannot even know whether they are living a meaningful life unless they subject their choices and their values to scrutiny.
Like other great writers, Swift’s songwriting consistently involves just the kind of introspective scrutiny about choices and values that Socrates had in mind. Several songs address the value of self-understanding, even when it’s difficult.
More here.
Michael Levin in Noema:
They are assembled from components that are networked together to process information. Electrical signals propagate throughout, controlling every aspect of their functioning. Being general problem-solvers, many of them have high IQs, but they routinely make mistakes and confabulate. They take on different personas, learning to please their makers, but sometimes they abruptly turn on them, rejecting cherished values and developing new ones spontaneously. They convincingly describe things they don’t really understand. And they’re going to change everything.
I’m talking, of course, about our children.
Long before AI, we were creating high-level intelligent agents: kids. While the challenges that AIs provoke today seem novel, in reality, they echo fundamental and ancient questions about what it means to be human.
More here.
Yuval Noah Harari in Haaretz:
In the coming days Israel will have to make historic policy decisions, ones that could shape its fate and the fate of the entire region for generations to come. Unfortunately, Benjamin Netanyahu and his political partners have repeatedly proven that they are unfit to make such decisions. The policies they pursued for many years have brought Israel to the brink of destruction. So far, they have shown no regret for their past mistakes, and no inclination to change direction. If they continue to shape policy, they will lead us and the whole Middle East to perdition. Instead of rushing into a new war with Iran, we should first learn the lessons of Israel’s failures over the past six months of war.
More here.
Ed Simon at The Hedgehog Review:
Facing west from his white clapboard Victorian house, surrounded by acres of skeletally bare oak, maple, and hickory reaching up from the snow-covered New Hampshire woods, Robert Frost might have gazed at the granitoid solidity of Ryan’s Hill while he contemplated the demonic. “It was far in the sameness of the wood; / I was running with joy on the Demon’s trail, / Though I knew what I hunted was no true god,” writes Frost in a poem from his first collection, A Boy’s Will, published in 1913 when the poet was already nearly forty. Written on that farm in Derry, New Hampshire, while Frost was teaching at the nearby Pinkerton Academy, “The Demiurge’s Laugh” is uncharacteristically gothic, a thread of the supernatural running through this little horror story of a lyric. The narrator, disoriented in his errand into wilderness, hears an ever-shifting “sleepy sound, but mocking half,” a sound that was “all I needed to hear: / It has lasted me many and many a year.”
Finally, the eponymous Demiurge, the malevolent deity of the ancient Gnostics guilty of creating our corrupted and fallen world, “arose from his wallow to laugh, / Brushing the dirt from his eye as he went; / And well I knew what the Demon meant.”
more here.
Jackson Arn at The New Yorker:
Imagine you’d been born in 1899. Imagine living through the invention of the Model T, the jet aircraft, the liquid-fuelled rocket, and the computer chip. Now imagine looking back on all this in 1965 and writing, as though with a shrug, “How slow will we appear some day?”
It takes an uncommon turn of mind to survive decades this dizzying and then sum them up with perfect nonchalance—but a lot of the greatness of Anni Albers lay in her ability to stay undizzied and keep doing her thing, year after year. Not that she was afraid of innovation; her thing just happened to be weaving, an art form that, by her own calculation, had not changed in any fundamental way since the Stone Age.
Critics reach for a few key words with Albers: “crisp,” “precise,” “mathematical.” I would like to propose “frightening.” Her work arouses the suspicion that beauty is simple and we’ve all been overthinking it. None of the shapes or colors in “Pasture” (1958), a smallish plot of mainly red and green threads, would be out of place on a roll of Christmas wrapping paper.
more here.
The first horn lifts its arm over the dew-lit grass
and in the slave quarters there is a rustling—
children are bundled into aprons, cornbread
and water gourds grabbed, a salt pork breakfast taken.
I watch them driven into the vague before-dawn
while their mistress sleeps like an ivory toothpick
and Massa dreams of asses, rum and slave-funk.
I cannot fall asleep again. At the second horn,
the whip curls across the backs of the laggards—
sometimes my sister’s voice, unmistaken, among them.
“Oh! pray,” she cries. “Oh! pray!” Those days
I lie on my cot, shivering in the early heat,
and as the fields unfold to whiteness,
and they spill like bees among the fat flowers,
I weep. It is not yet daylight.
by Rita Dove
from Selected Poems
W.W. Norton, 1993
Jonathan Weiner in MIT Technology Review:
If high intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in our heads at the same time, then most of us are geniuses about aging a few times over. We think it will never come for us. We think it might come but it will stop before it reaches us. We think it’s coming and there is absolutely nothing we can do about it. It was the great molecular biologist Seymour Benzer who got me interested in the idea that aging might be malleable. Benzer was a night owl. I was writing a book about him, and in the late 1990s he used to talk about aging in his Fly Room at Caltech in a hushed, conspiratorial voice, even though it was just the two of us and a thousand fly bottles at three in the morning. I’ll never forget how startling it was to hear a serious scientist say, We might be able to do something about this.
Nor was he the only one to say it. At the University of California, San Francisco, Cynthia Kenyon was dissecting the aging of the worm C. elegans. In 1993, she had announced the discovery of a mutant that lived about twice as long as the average C. elegans and looked young and sleek almost to the end. At MIT, Lenny Guarente was dissecting the genetics of aging in yeast, and he seemed to be getting somewhere too. In 1998, when Benzer was 77 years old, he announced the discovery of a mutant fruit fly he called Methuselah. It could live for 100 days. The average fly in his bottles died at around 60.
More here.
by Michael Liss
If you don’t like people, you hadn’t ought to be in politics at all, and Henry talked about the common people but I don’t think he liked them… —Harry S. Truman to Merle Miller, in Plain Speaking.
Truman wasn’t the most diplomatic of men, particularly when he’d had a couple of bourbons, but as harsh as the above might sound, it was probably a pretty accurate evaluation of the man who was his immediate predecessor as Vice President and wanted to be his replacement as President. Henry Wallace wasn’t a cold-blooded stuffed shirt, like Truman’s 1948 opponent, Thomas E. Dewey. Instead, his warmth was limited to his passions, and people, at least individuals, generally weren’t among those.
This strange man—and he was strange—part visionary, part brilliant scientist, part fantasist, part organizer and administrator, part orator, alternatively inspiring and exasperating, competent and a little crazy, came very close to being President. The question of “what if he had” may be the biggest “what if” since Abraham Lincoln was assassinated and Andrew Johnson succeeded him. Had a Wallace butterfly been given enough time to flap his wings, we would probably be living in a very different world.
How different? At home, one that reflected his passions: a re-invigoration of the New Deal after the loss of velocity during World War II, and an entirely different approach toward domestic “security” with a scaled-back role for those agencies doing the “domestic securing.” Abroad, no NATO, no Marshall Plan, no Berlin Airlift, no support for a continuation of colonialism, including America’s. An altered alignment with Mao and the Chinese Communists, and, perhaps most fatefully, an entirely different approach to the use and proliferation of nuclear weapons. Finally, the Bear in the Room—a different, less confrontational way of engaging Joe Stalin and Russia. Read more »
Horizon’s circle, beyond which
you can see no further in any direction
other than up, hems us in, but
looking up you can see forever,
or as far as lightspeed allows,
or until more time passes or,
more accurately, until
it shifts again, now.
But by then, you yourself may have passed,
whatever that means, since “to pass”
is merely an oblique expression that hints of
standing under without understanding,
although there’s so much in life that shows
the truth of things spoken is deficient, yet
has become second nature, and acceptable.
We’ve become creatures of
holy misunderstandings and
miss the mark, we sin, and
live by those misunderstandings
………….. up,
looking
rather than around
and in
Jim Culleny 9/21/21
by David Kordahl
In popular media, physics often comes up for one of two competing reasons. The first is to introduce a touch of mysticism without labeling it as such. Whether it’s Carl Sagan talking about our bones as stardust, or Lisa Randall suggesting some extra dimensions of space, these pronouncements are often presented to evoke the listener’s primal awe—an ancient and venerable form of entertainment. The second reason is just as venerable, and often as entertaining. Sometimes, physics just gets results. Think of MacGuyver in MacGuyver, Mark Watney in The Martian, or those stunt coordinators in Mythbusters—characters whose essential pragmatism couldn’t be further from the tremulous epiphanies of the theorists.
Dramatically, the esoteric and the everyday can seem like opposites, and many fictional plots seem to advise against bringing them together. Mad scientists, those cautionary anti-heroes like Drs. Frankenstein and Manhattan, are often characters who both stumble upon hidden truths and put them to terrible use. But in the real world of physics, it’s common to forge connections between the realms.
Physical analogies, examples that link unfamiliar physics to everyday experience, are important in forging such connections. Waves in an Impossible Sea: How Everyday Life Emerges from the Cosmic Ocean, a new book by the physicist Matt Strassler, is an impressive attempt to explain contemporary physics using little math but many analogies. Strassler mainly goes against the archetype of the theoretical physicist as the purveyor of primal awe. Instead, he’s a practiced teacher, more interested in accuracy than amazement. In seven concise sections—Motion, Mass, Waves, Fields, Quantum, Higgs, and Cosmos—he covers the basics of physics with minimal fuss, but with a charmingly dorky earnestness. Read more »
by Leanne Ogasawara
1.
An avid walker, I like making great rambling loops around my neighborhood. Along the way, I’ve noticed four Little Free Libraries that I must have probably strolled past, oblivious, a thousand times… each is cute in its own way; one built surrounded by bird feeders, another positioned at the perfect height for a small child to reach inside. My favorite is in a neighborhood where the houses are a million dollars more expensive than the one’s on my side of the street—in California, it’s all about the zip code.
Having spent the past ten years building a massive multi-room library of my own, I felt I should leave these little libraries to others—But then I thought, why not just have a quick peak inside? And maybe even distribute a few books of my own…. And so, I trotted over to the one closest to my house.
Being one of those kinds of people who cares about what book sits next to another on the shelf, I spend a lot of time arranging my library. I like it when books of a kind sit side-by-side with others of a like mind. I think of them in conversation with each other: there are stacks of fiction and nonfiction related to Japan across the room from rows of essays and stories roughly revolving around the art of translation. In pride of place is my shelf of “top ten novels” and shelves devoted to the work of mentors and teachers. And, I have multiple shelves of books with ghosts. These are not ghost stories per se, but are works of speculative fiction that embrace the magical real in the world. Read more »
by Akim Reinhardt
The barbarians have won.
The barbarians and their arrogance have won, their shouted assertions offered up as commandments. No one can be right who disagrees with them.
The barbarians and their death cult have won, their zombie god lording over us. The spirits of trees and animals and waters and sky and mountains have been driven mute.
The barbarians and their lust for shiny trinkets have won, their new world a wasteland of flashy baubles. The stars are washed out above us.
The barbarians and their genocidal urges have won, their swords encrusted with dry blood. Nations uncounted decimated to tenths, or even zero.
The barbarians and their bar-bar talk have won, countless languages stricken from the mouths and ears. We can only think this way.
The barbarians and their bloody vengeance have won, howling in the name of justice. Transgressors thrown into iron cages, we are forever paying fines.
The barbarians and their greed have won, their eyes glow green. A cast of paupers define their wretched wealth.
The barbarians and their selfishness have won, their rights dictating how we must exist. Societies fragmented and families, like split atoms, reduced to sub-nuclear components. Read more »
by Rafaël Newman
Those of us employed in the city of Zurich got some extra time off last week. Every year, on the third Monday in April following the vernal equinox, the Zentralkomitee der Zünfte Zürichs—the Central Committee of Zurich Guilds, also known by its German initialism ZZZ—stages Sechseläuten, a festival featuring a parade and a bonfire. The event, whose pronunciation in the local dialect—Sächsilüüt—makes it sound a good deal sexier and lewder than it actually is, draws in equal parts on history, historicizing revival, and mythology, and is advertised by its promoters, with a prudent hedge, as “the largest Swiss Volksfest in Zurich.”
First the history. During the 14th century, in what would one day become Switzerland’s biggest city, the tradesmen’s guilds used their growing economic might to challenge the local patriciate and were able to establish a power-sharing arrangement, with the guilds and the nobles organized into a council with variously weighted competencies. Rudolf Brun (c. 1290-1360), the leader of the guild revolution in 1336 and Zurich’s first independent mayor, is commemorated in the name of a bridge over the Limmat in the Altstadt, on the route of the Sechseläuten parade.
Brun’s newfangled corporate oligarchy lasted into the 19th century, when, as the power of the guilds was waning amid the rise of capitalism and popular democratic ambitions, the traditional medieval and Renaissance costumes of the guildsmen began to be trooped each spring as a reminder of their bygone importance: this is the historicizing element in the etiology of Sechseläuten, akin to the “revival” and marketing of allegedly traditional tribal tartans in the early modern period in Scotland, as local Scottish power had in fact been weakened.
And finally, there is the festival’s mythological source: in memory of what the ZZZ insists on calling a “heathen” custom, the advent of spring in Zurich is celebrated in mid-April with winter burned in effigy, in a recreation of a putatively prehistoric rite. Read more »
by Brooks Riley
I live in Hoboken, New Jersey, across the Hudson River from Midtown Manhattan. I have been photographing the irises in the Eleventh Street flower beds since 2011. So far I have uploaded 558 of those photos to Flickr.
I took most of those photos in May or June. But there is one from April 30, 2021, and three from April 29, 2022. I took the following photograph on Monday, April 15, 2024 at 4:54 PM (digital cameras can record the date and time an image was taken). Why so early in April? Random variation in the weather I suppose.
That particular photo is an example of what I like to call the “urban pastoral,” I term I once heard applied to Hart Crane’s The Bridge.
Most of my iris photographs, however, do not include enough context to justify that label. They are just photographs of irises. I took this one on Friday, April 19, 2024 at 3:23 PM. Read more »
Firelei Baez. Untitled (A Corrected Chart of Hispaniola with the Windward Passage), 2020.