by W. Alex Foxworthy

The Paradox

The universe is dying. The second law of thermodynamics tells us that entropy—disorder, randomness, the dispersal of energy—increases inexorably over time. Every star that burns, every thought that fires, every act of creation contributes to the long slide toward heat death: a future of maximum entropy where nothing happens because nothing can happen. The gradients that permit work have been spent. The universe reaches equilibrium and stays there, forever.

Astronomers can see this future written faintly in the sky: the cosmic background radiation cooling by a fraction of a degree every billion years, galaxies drifting apart as dark energy stretches the fabric of space. The arrow points one way. It does not bend.

And yet.

In the midst of this cosmic unwinding, complexity keeps emerging. Galaxies condense from primordial hydrogen. Stars ignite and forge heavy elements in their cores. Planets form, chemistry becomes biology, and biology eventually produces brains—three-pound prediction engines capable of modeling the universe that made them, including modeling their own inevitable dissolution within it.

In 1944, the physicist Erwin Schrödinger posed this puzzle in What Is Life? How do living systems maintain their exquisite organization while the universe trends toward disorder? His answer pointed toward something he called “negentropy”—the ability of organisms to feed on order, importing low-entropy energy and exporting high-entropy waste. Life doesn’t violate thermodynamics; it surfs the gradient.

But Schrödinger’s insight leaves the deeper question untouched: Why does any of this feel like anything? How do we reconcile the arrow of entropy with the emergence not just of complexity, but of mind—of experience, of caring, of mattering? This is not merely a puzzle for physics. It touches on the deepest questions we can ask: What are we? Why does anything feel like anything? And does it matter that we exist at all? Read more »

by Derek Neal

Three weeks later and I’m almost fully healed. My ribs still hurt when I lie down to sleep and when I rise in the morning, but sitting and walking are fine. In another week I’ll be able to return to the gym and attempt some light weightlifting, a welcome resumption of my weekly routine. There was, however, a silver lining to my accident. In the days immediately following it, I could do little else but read. Sitting down in a chair, I was stuck there. So it was that I took A River Runs Through It (1976) by Norman Maclean off the bookshelf in my father’s office and began to turn its pages.

At one time, I’d referred to this book as “my favorite,” but that had been over 10 years ago, and since I no longer owned a copy, I’d forgotten why the book had made such an impression on me. I would soon remember, sitting in the chair and reading the 100-page autobiographical novella over a period of two or three sittings, interspersed with short breaks for more Advil and Tylenol, and to return the ice pack around my side to the freezer. The snow was falling softly on the other side of the large windows in the office, the same snow that I’d been cutting through the day before, turning this way and that on my skis, marveling at my own ability after not having been on the mountain for many years. It really is just like riding a bike, I thought to myself.

Maclean’s book is about the physical, too, about how the body can transcend itself through movement, and it seemed somehow appropriate that I would be reading it in my incapacitated state, allowing me to live vicariously through the two brothers in the story, both excellent fly fishers. The story, in fact, simply consists of a few set pieces built around fly fishing in Montana: the author fishing the “Big Blackfoot” river with his brother, Paul; their fishing the Elkhorn and the Blackfoot with the author’s brother-in-law; a final fishing trip with their father.

These fishing excursions allow Maclean to philosophize about life and to convince us that fly fishing is a spiritual act and the highest end a to which a person can aspire. Read more »

Allan Rohan Crite. Sometimes I’m Up, Sometimes I’m Down. Illustration for Three Spirituals from Earth to Heaven (Cambridge, Mass., 1948),” 1937. 

(Photographs of framed prints by Sughra Raza).

More here and here.

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by Malcolm Murray

Moltbook, the social network for AIs that launched only last week and already has more than a million AI agents, is a clear example of how little we can foresee of the risks that will arise when autonomous AI agents interact. In the first week, the AIs on Moltbook have both already founded their own religion and voiced their need for private communication that humans can’t snoop on. Scott Alexander has a post with many more interesting examples.

This is a clear example of how little we can foresee how AI will be implemented, as well as just plainly independently evolve, as we insert millions, billions or trillions of new intelligences into the societal infrastructure.

The key word describing AI evolution in 2025 was “jaggedness”. While LLM agents had superhuman capabilities in math, coding and science, they still lagged far behind humans in other areas, such as loading the dishwasher or buying something online. LLMs can reach gold-level performance on the International Math Olympiad, but also continue to make simple mistakes showing the forgetfulness and inconsistency of a 5-year old human child. They are on their way to becoming geniuses in a data center, but at this point, they are geniuses of the type that mistake their wife for their hat.

This jagged nature of frontier AI seems as it is a pattern we are stuck with in the current paradigm. Even as models progress, there is no expectation that their performance would suddenly become more uniform. This is perhaps not surprising – there is no general law of intelligence that suggests that intelligence should be uniformly applied. It is not the case with humans or animals, so why would it be the case for machine intelligence? Read more »

Snow Mountain

The place is cool and distant,
the air is clear of error,
the vista wide and brimming.

Everything is still,
undone.

Jim Culleny, 1974

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by Eric Feigenbaum

“This hospital makes mine look filthy,” the nurse manager from Sacramento said to me as we walked the halls of Tan Tock Seng Hospital.

This wasn’t a surprising first reaction to a Singaporean hospital. What Nancy said later surprised me more.

“I’m not sure about whether these nurses can handle working in an American ICU – their setup is so much better than ours,” Nancy told me. “These nurses are each taking care of one patient. And each patient is in a room with a complete set of state-of-the-art equipment. You would never find this in an American hospital, I’m sorry to say. I wish we had care quality like this. But I don’t know how nurses used to focusing entirely on one critical patient will do when they have to take care of two – and in some hospitals, even three patients using shared equipment coming down the hall on crash carts.”

At that time – 2004 to 2006 – I worked recruiting foreign nurses for US hospitals. Often, nurse managers would conduct video interviews, but on those occasions when we could talk hospitals into sending their interviewers to Singapore, the results were always better. Of course, the prelude to live interviews was helping the nurse managers understand the nurses’ work environments – which in turn gave them key information about things like skills, practice and language ability.

For several hours, we had toured the Johns Hopkins facility in Singapore – at that time located within National University Hospital – NUH itself and then Tan Tock Seng. At every step, Nancy and her colleague Gloria were amazed by facilities. Not only was the quality of care undeniable, but the nurses they spoke with were erudite and intelligent. Read more »

by Cannon Schmitt, guest columnist

“Everyone in my program is queer, neurodivergent, or both.” A soft ding interrupted the conversation, the elevator doors slid open, and we stepped out into a hallway full of people wearing name tags and carrying identical tote bags. I can’t remember anything about “Texts Under Pressure,” the panel we were on our way to see. But the overheard remark from one English lit doctoral student to another stuck because it reminded me of vampires, and of the value of the humanities

Vampires first. They are misfits. In this and nearly every other way—the crosses and the garlic, the stake through the heart, the homoeroticism barely concealed beneath the overblown heteroeroticism—Bram Stoker’s Dracula set the pattern.

Whatever else may be said about Count Dracula, the main thing is that he doesn’t belong. Why should the Ur-vampire be an Eastern European in London, speaking nearly fluent but accented English, or an aristocrat negotiating a middle-class world? Why should vampiric immortality register, not as the triumphant conquest of death, but as a curse that forces you to live on until you find yourself stranded somewhen unrecognizable, alone of your kind? Then there’s the blood. As vegans and the gluten-free can testify, special dietary requirements turn you into a curiosity, the person who gets a sad little labelled side plate at gatherings, a monumental bother even if politeness demands pretending otherwise.

Most fiction tells the story of an outsider—that’s what makes the novel the genre of modernity. But Dracula stands out by giving us a displaced, maladjusted title character with whom it’s impossible to empathize. Think Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, or Jane Eyre but with Anna, Emma, or Jane spending most of her time offstage, her inner world out of reach, her motivations opaque. Stoker pieces his plot together from diary entries, letters, telegrams, newspaper clippings, even excerpts from a ship’s log. Everyone involved in hunting down the vampire, regardless of how minor or peripheral, has their say. But the voice of the vampire himself is almost absent. Read more »

Rocky cliff with a dusting of snow (and more snow falling) in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol. Part of the winter Olympics will be in South Tyrol, starting next week, so this is good.

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by Rafaël Newman

One hundred and sixty years ago this month, in a national referendum held on January 14, 1866, Jews were given the official right to reside throughout Switzerland. Jewish people, whether of foreign provenance or Swiss-born and already living on Swiss territory, had been explicitly forbidden to establish residency in Switzerland in its constitution of 1848, the year modern Switzerland was founded. Since the Middle Ages, when they were re-admitted following the pogroms and expulsions of the 14th century, such permanent domicile as was permitted to Jews among the Swiss had been confined to the two villages of Endingen and Lengnau, in the canton of Argovia. It was only under economic pressure from its main trading partners, the US and France, which threatened the young state with punitive tariffs, that Switzerland—in the form of contemporary Swiss suffrage: in other words, exclusively Christian men—agreed to make the change. Even so, rates of approval in 1866 were drastically unequal across the country, with 93.9% of voters in the populous canton of Zurich favoring Jewish residency, and the tiny, remote half-canton of Appenzell Innerrhoden, which would continue to deny women, whether Christian or otherwise, the right to vote until the late 20th century, rejecting the measure by 98%.

Seventy-five years later, with World War encroaching on its frontiers, the Swiss establishment saw this enforced tolerance tested anew, as Jews fled the Third Reich for asylum within Switzerland’s neutral borders. Although they accepted some of these refugees, Swiss officials notoriously sent many back, their passports marked with a “J”, and placed restrictions on the professional and political activities of those they did admit (such as the poet and philosopher Margarete Susman, on whom see here and here), both to protect “native” Swiss from competition, and to avoid provoking the Nazi authorities, with whom clandestine relations were being maintained.

Nevertheless, in January 1941, a group of Jewish residents in Zurich, several foreign-born, was able to join the musician Marko Rothmüller in founding Omanut, an association for the promotion of Jewish art. The Swiss organization was created in memory of the original Omanut, which Rothmüller, a Yugoslav immigrant, had founded in 1935 in Zagreb, but which had since vanished under the Nazi occupation of Croatia. Read more »

by Charles Siegel

Sun went down in honey
And the moon came up in wine
You know the stars were spinning dizzy
Lord the band kept us so busy
We forgot about the time

That is a verse from “The Music Never Stopped,” a song written by Bob Weir and John Barlow, and recorded on the Grateful Dead’s 1975 album “Blues for Allah.” Weir, the rhythm guitarist and one of the two principal composers for the band, died earlier this month at 78. His obituary appeared in the New York Times and everywhere else. I can add nothing to all the tributes and encomia, or the descriptions of his life and music. But one aspect of his career that seems to have gotten little attention is fascinating to me: he may very well have played before more people than any other musician ever.

I do not remotely qualify as a Deadhead. I saw the Grateful Dead seven times, albeit in seven different cities. I’ve seen Dead and Company, the most recent successor band, a few times, including last year at the Sphere in Las Vegas.

But I’ve been listening to their music for most of my life. I had some of their albums, though by no means all of them, and I had a few other albums on which one or more of the members played. I wore out “Old and In the Way,” for example, a great collaboration between Jerry Garcia and some bluegrass masters, during college. In law school I wore out the live album “Dead Set.” So while there are legions of people, some of whom are good friends, who saw the band many more times, I have spent a fair amount of time listening to and thinking about them. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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by William Benzon

This article has three main sections. Immediately following the image (created by ChatGPT) is an article by me, ChatGPT 5.2 and Claude 4.5: The Grammar of Truth: What Language Models Reveal About Language Itself. Claude came up with that title. After that there’s a much shorter section in which I explain how the three of us created that article. I conclude by I taking the question of how to properly credit such writing. That issue is one aspect of the institutionalization discussed in what I will call the “included article.”

The Grammar of Truth: What Language Models Reveal About Language Itself

William Benzon, assisted by ChatGPT 5.2 and Claude 4.5

In the 1980s, when the linguist Daniel Everett went to live with the Pirahã people of the Amazon, he had a mission: to translate the Bible into their language and convert them to Christianity. What he discovered, however, was something he hadn’t anticipated. The Pirahã didn’t exactly reject his religious message. They just couldn’t take him seriously.

The problem, as Everett eventually came to understand, was grammatical. Pirahã requires speakers to mark the source of their knowledge. When you make a claim about something, you have to indicate whether you witnessed it directly, heard it from someone else, or learned it in a dream. This isn’t an optional rhetorical flourish. It’s as obligatory as verb tense in English. Everett had not seen Jesus himself. He knew no one who had. And he wasn’t reporting a dream. By the grammatical standards of Pirahã discourse, he had no business speaking at all.

This grammatical feature—what linguists call evidentiality—turns out to be far more than a curiosity about an Amazonian language. It opens a window onto something fundamental about how human societies organize knowledge. And, as we’ll see, it ultimately reveals why the emergence of large language models like ChatGPT represents not just a technological achievement but a conceptual rupture that forces us to rethink what language itself is. Read more »

by Jeroen Bouterse

I have put off reading G.H. Hardy’s Mathematician’s Apology (1940) to the end for too long. Now that I have, I can say with conviction that if you ever find yourself needing to justify why people should learn at least some mathematics, then this is the text to avoid, and Hardy provides the arguments you should stay away from furthest. And yet, it grew on me as an honest presentation of Hardy’s perspective on why anything is worth doing.

Hardy doubted that composing his Apology was one of those things. In the first paragraph, he apologizes for it: writing about mathematics is the business of second-rate minds, unable to do innovative math themselves. He assures us that he is only embarking on it because past sixty, he is now too old to do the real thing. This sets the tone for an essay full of quick and haughty judgments. Compliments paid with authority to the greats, confident generalizations based on personal or historical anecdote, and a great deal of dismissive hand-waving towards people or things beneath Hardy’s attention. “Newton made a quite competent Master of the Mint”, Hardy knows; and on we go, to the next item of an enumeration illustrating that mathematicians past their prime rarely excel in anything else. In a footnote, he is generous enough to add: “Pascal seems the best.”

The Apology still constitutes an interesting argument, though a structural weakness lies in the stress Hardy puts on what Ian Hacking would call ‘elevator words’: terms such as real, beautiful, or serious do most of the work separating mathematics from everything else, and the worthwhile kind of mathematics from the rest. Throughout his essay, we can see Hardy alternating between throwing those terms around as if their meaning is self-evident, and feeling pressed to prop them up with some kind of clarification. Between chess problems and certain mathematical theorems, for example, there is “an unmistakable difference of class. [The theorems] are much more serious, and also much more beautiful; can we define, a little more closely, where their superiority lies?” Read more »

Sughra Raza. Blood.  August 2024.

Digital Photograph.

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