Knocking At The Gate

  From the Harper's Index for June 2022: Percentage of the U.S. population that owns a gun, according to the average American’s estimate: 54 That actually owns a gun: 32 Percentage of the U.S. population that is transgender, according to the average American’s estimate: 21 That is actually transgender: 0.6 Full index and sources here.

Writing in Pluralistic , Cory Doctorow explains how certain weaknesses of machine learning (and perhaps of human nature). In particular, he looks at the special problem of initialization bias — that the results of machine learning are dependent on the order in which the algorithm gets fed data. This matters to everyone, because the stakes are high: We have increasingly outsourced our decision-making to machine learning models ("the algorithm"). The whole point of building recommendation, sorting, and "decision support" systems on ML is to undertake assessments at superhuman speed and scale, which means that the idea of a "human in the loop" who validates machine judgment is a mere figleaf, and it only gets worse from here. There are real consequences to this. I mean, for starters, if you get killed by a US military drone, chances are the shot was called by a machine-learning model. And it's worse than that, since these errors probably aren'

By algorithmic happenstance, today I came across "Stay" by Matt Rollings, featuring Allison Krauss and Vince Gill . It was originally recorded by Alisan Porter in 2016 . This recording with Krauss' angelic voice caught my attention, and so I didn't skip through it. As I listened, I was struck by the beauty of the chords and of course by Krauss' abundant soul gushing out of every syllable.  I realized I was feeling the new-to-me song a lot stronger than I would have expected when it finally dawned on me that this song is about a mother speaking to her children. What was apparently on my mind as I listened to the sweet lyrics was the mothers and fathers of the children murdered at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas yesterday. I am yours and you are mine Bound together from the start I will carry you until it's time to go And I'll always be the home You come back to in your heart Oh stay, stay, stay What must it feel like, I keep wondering, to never hold

Zander Moricz, the Pine View School Class President is also a plaintiff in a suit challenging Florida's "Don't Say Gay" law. School officials forbade him to discuss it during his commencement speech, so he did not. At least not directly.

Writing in Current Affairs , Nathan J. Robinson interviews UC-Berkeley professor (and noted cryptocurrency skeptic) Nicholas Weaver. The interviews by recalling a famous previous statement from Weaver summarizing part of what concerns him about cyrptocurrency: This is a virus. Its harms are substantial. It has enabled billion dollar criminal enterprises. It has enabled venture capitalists to do securities fraud as their business. It has sucked people in. So either avoid it or help me make it die in a fire. It gets darker from there. Full article here. 

Writing in The Washington Post , Zachary Pincus-Roth explains that Eugene Levy, Martin Short, Andrea Martin, Victor Garber, and Paul Shaffer all appeared in the musical play Godspell . This is not too surprising, since that play has always been in production somewhere since it was created, and a great many well-known performers have appeared in it at some point in their careers. What's a little more interesting is that they were all in the same cast at the same theater at the same time. Full article with photographs, audio files, and videos here.

Writing in Current Affairs , novelist and noted Floridian Jeff VanderMeer connects a great many dots (with links and footnotes) regarding how and why Florida leaders and developers have repeatedly worked together to destroy the state's unique ecosystem, what's wrong with the toll roads projects, why the wildlife corridor will fail, and why most Floridians sleep each night on the suffocated corpes of gopher tortoises. It's detailed, vigorously-argued, and must-read treatise on why we need to care for this onetime Eden.  You can tell many stories about Florida, but one of the most tragic and with the worst long-term consequences is this: since development in Florida began in earnest in the 20th century, state leaders and developers have chosen a cruel, unsustainable legacy involving the nonstop slaughter of wildlife and the destruction of habitat, eliminating some of the most unique flora and fauna in the world.   Full article here.

Writing in Rolling Stone , Daniel Kreps considers the life and work of progressive music pioneer Vangelis, who passed away on May 17.  “Vangelis Papathanassiou is no longer with us. For the whole world, this sad news demonstrates that the world music scene has lost the international ‘Vangelis,’ the protagonist of electronic sound, of the Oscars, of Mythology and the hits,” Greece’s prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis tweeted, as translated by Rolling Stone . “For us Greeks, who know his second name was Odysseus, it means that he’s begun his long trip to the Chariots of Fire. From there, he’ll always send us his notes.” Full obituary here.

Writing in X-Ray Literary Magazine , Curtis Smith connects a great many feelings in only six paragraphs. Here's the first: You stop at the market after work. This Tuesday, that feels like a Thursday, these speeding years and forever days, and, short of death, there’s no end in sight. The weekends where all you want to do is sleep. The vacations you can’t afford. You’re here for dinner, although cereal feels like a saner option than making one more decision. A song plays, and here you are, adrift on a marketer’s algorithm, taken back to your teenage bedroom, and what would that girl say if she could see you now?   Full text of "The Song In Your Head" here.

Writing in Lapham's Quarterly , Kim Beil works through the history of color photography — and its meaning, its interpretations, its mysteries and consternations. Along the way, she consults Ludwig Wittgenstein and Oliver Sacks. It's not a simple subject to consider because it encompasses issues of physics, physiology, and culture: While many midcentury commentators were content to gesture vaguely to poor memory or a lack of objectivity, inventor Edwin Land dedicated twenty years of experimentation to trying to explain these effects. Land was critical of color photography, despite his role as Polaroid’s founder and chairman, because photography “reinforced the belief that the colors discerned by Newton in the spectrum are, with minor qualifications, the colors of the world around us.” Color, in Land’s view, is largely internal. It is far more influenced by our expectations than by any other factor, even ambient light. He wrote—and proved—that “the eye has evolved to see

South African lines of steam navigation and cables in 1893. (Public domain.) Writing in Rest Of World , Andrew Blum and Carey Baraka describe how Google and Meta are building a massive new undersea cable network to expand and improve Internet access to the 1.4 billion people who live in Africa. These immense infrastructure projects are as impressive and potentially world-changing as they were centuries ago when the tech giants of those days began laying telegraph cable. There is colossal good to be accomplished by this work, but there is a caution: The Internet’s initial promise was to decentralize telecommunications, releasing consumers from the monopoly grip of telecomms incumbents. Over the last 30 years, the internet has done that, and much more. But undersea cables, owned by the Internet’s behemoths, hint at a return to where we started: a near future in which a select group of massive corporations have not merely tightened their hold on our online activity but have deliber

Writing in The Washington Post , Carlos Lozada reviews two new books on the threats to liberal democracy: Liberalism and Its Discontents by Francis Fukuyama and The Age of the Strongman by Gideon Rachma: When warring cultures and distant poles are the recurring metaphors for our politics, genteel calls for moderation may seem quaint. When authoritarian impulses are ascendant, wishing for self-restraint can feel foolish, a denial of reality and an abdication of responsibility. But what if moderation and restraint — the acceptance of limits in political life — are not just the right thing, but really all that is left to try? Full review here.  

Here's an analysis of the fields of study of all the earned doctorates awarded by U.S. colleges and universities from 1990 to 2020. Doctoral study increases The three fields of study with the greatest increase in doctorates were: * Biological and biomedical sciences * Heatlh sciences * Computer and information sciences The growth in these majors is remarkable. The number of doctorates in biological and biomedical sciences rose from 4,328 in 1990 to 8,418 in 2020. (This includes topics such as anatomy, bacteriology, botany, endocrinology, genetics, genomics, neuroscience, and pharmacology often studied by professors of biology and academic and industrial research scientists.) D octoral study decreases The three fields of study with the greatest decrease in doctorates were: * Education administration * Teacher education * Education research The decline in these majors is striking. The number of doctorates in education administration fell from 1,664 in 1990 to 927 in 2020. (This inclu

Writing in The New York Review Of Books , Laura Miller goes deep into Olga Ravn’s The Employees: A Workplace Novel Of The 22nd Century. The premise is unsettling, as is the title: It is the first book by the Danish poet, novelist, and literary critic to be translated into English and was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2021. Presented as a collection of records, primarily the transcripts of statements made by the crew of the Six Thousand Ship to a committee of unspecified composition, it documents the breakdown of the ship’s mission after the vessel arrives at a planet called New Discovery and the crew brings aboard a selection of objects found there. But the objects—which are referred to only as “the objects,” the most reductive and nondescriptive term for pretty much anything—aren’t monsters and don’t chase the crew members around. None of the speakers offer a full description of these things (or creatures?), but Ravn has said they were inspired by the sc

The Fence itemizes all possible plots by major authors, such as: Anthony Trollope : Your happiness is put on hold when it transpires your fiancé failed to correctly cash a cheque. This lasts for 130 chapters. Everyone else is ordained. More possible plots by major authors here.

English barista James Hoffman was presented with an old bag of coffee beans apparently from Harrods. In this video, he explains how he determined it was probably sold in Argentina in the 1930s. He then roasted the beans, ground them, and brewed himself a cup.

David Mamet is inarguably one of our greatest living playwrights, and no small talent as a director. His boldness, his wit, his hard-nosed ability to show us our own demons and our own follies would suggest that anything at all he care to write would be worth reading. Writing in The Washington Post , however, Daniel Oppenheimer finds Mamet's new e-book ( Recessional: The Death of Free Speech and the Cost of a Free Lunch ) to be a disappointment: Telling an author what he should have written is one of the cardinal sins of book criticism. In the case of Recessional , though, it seems like the only critically generous thing to do. Because the alternative is to dwell on the book as it is, which is a pale facsimile of my hypothetical. “Recessional” isn’t really a book at all but a McBook. It’s a collection of disparate pieces, written mostly as columns for National Review, that are given back to us in book form only because the author has a big name and there’s some money to be m

Writing in Quanta Magazine , Yasemin Saplakoglu explains some approaches to the idea of resurrecting extinct species such as the mammoth or the dodo. She finds that for many researchers, it doesn't matter so much whether it is technically possible or not: Most de-extinction researchers aren’t looking to resurrect a charismatic ancient beast just for the sake of putting it into the nearest zoo for viewer pleasure. Rather, they are aiming to create proxies for educational or conservation purposes, such as to fill the void left by their extinct counterparts in ecosystems or to boost the numbers of modern-day endangered species. Full article here.

Writing in The Hedgehog Review , Matthew Mutter reviews two works on value, reason, aesthetics, and the role of authority in the humanities: A Defense of Judgment (2021) by Michael Clune and Humanist Reason: A History. An Argument. A Plan. (2021) by Eric Hayot. How do we know what is good, and how can we be sure of what we know? For years, I played basketball with a humanities skeptic. He was an endowment manager at the Ivy League university from which he had graduated with a degree in economics. He knew I was a professor of literature, and one day he asked what I taught—and did I by any chance teach Moby-Dick ? I nodded, and he said, “You don’t believe the hype, do you?” His proudest moment in college had come when, required to read the novel for a first-year class, he developed a firm belief that Moby-Dick ’s reputation was explainable chiefly by its obscurity. The emperor had no clothes: The novel was taught because it was revered, and revered because it was taught. Baffled

In X-Ray Literary Magazine , Quinn Forlini's "After Not Leaving The House For Three Days" describes how Anna and her mother at last went for a walk:  Anna’s mother convinces her to go for a walk. The weather’s getting warmer. Anna feels like she’s been living inside a tunnel, or an artery.   She’s thirteen. Last week she dyed her hair purple from a box at the drugstore and it’s ugly. She pulls her hair into a ponytail, feeling the roughness as it passes through her fingers from the cheap dye. Her mother tried to warn her, and that made her want it more. Full story here.

Flea of The Red Hot Chili Peppers explains how the playing the bass involves playing with the drummer, the vocalist, and the other higher-pitched instruments — and, in considering his own work, the work of James Jamerson, and the work of Jaco Pastorius — he explains how the essence of superior bass playing is selflessness.

I make daily obeisance and peanut offerings to the weresquirrel living in an oak tree in our front yard.  It appears to considers me as any numinous incarnation from the rodent todash space might: with feigned indifference that melts to exaggerated jubilation, perhaps so that it might convince me to lower my defenses and inadvertently provide an opening through the thinny.  I hear the limnal kammen sounding. I hear it.  This furry son of Maerlyn and I had such an encounter just now. "Ah," I heard its wee dereistic voice say in my head, "So we meet again, and so again you bear the goober Arachis. Eftsoons shall it be again, and again. So it must be and so it must always be."  And yet I know it speaks falsely. How could it be otherwise?  I know it waits for me there, waits for me behind the tree I planted with my own hands, waiting for the world to move on, waiting for the beam to break at last. The ancient beast waits, and plots, and munches. — J.F. "Jeff"

Writing in Smithsonian Magazine , Sarah Kuta explains why two art museums (one in Maine and another in Pennsylvania) find themselves in charge of exhibiting thousands of never-before-seen paintings by Andrew Wyeth. Full article here.

Writing in The New York Times , T.M. Brown describe how a couple found an old milk crate full of old cassette tapes left behind in a house on Fire Island. The tapes turned out to be a vivid testimony of how music was used to fight death and hate during the AIDS epidemic. Full story with multimedia gallery here.

I have gone out, a possessed witch,    haunting the black air, braver at night;    dreaming evil, I have done my hitch    over the plain houses, light by light:    lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.    A woman like that is not a woman, quite.    I have been her kind. Anne Sexton. (1981). "Her Kind" from The Complete Poems of Anne Sexton. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin). Full poem here.

 I got up just around sunrise. Before I began making breakfast, I stepped out the front door.   I found myself standing thisclose to a juvenile rabbit, who seemed as surprised as I was. We considered each other for a few minutes. I stood still so as not to startle the little one, and it stood still likely to avoid becoming prey.  This state of affairs, while pleasant for me in the instant, is not how either of us wanted to spend the rest of the day, but I figured it wasn't really my place to make the first move.  Little bun was showing admirable restraint, I thought. I expected it to bolt for the safe cover of the abundant fan palms just a few feet away, but it did not. I could see its nose assessing what it could, its eyes unblinking, its ears folded low trying to keep a low profile.  Then we both heard the sudden whip of air beneath the great wings of some large raptor moving far too swiftly for me to identify, and we both startled from it. The dive was rapid and flamboyant, but

During the 1985 Grammy Awards show, there was a synthesizer medley performed by Thomas Dolby, Herbie Hancock, Howard Jones, and Stevie Wonder. It was quite a jam, and, although it came at least a decade too late, it recognized the ascendance of the synthesizer in pop, rock, jazz, and R&B. In a glaring reminder of how things were in the 80s, John Denver deadnamed Moog pioneer Wendy Carlos, whose phenomenal work had been a profound influence on each of these performers. This performance came nearly twenty years after Carlos' albums such as the platinum-selling Switched On Bach demonstrated how synthesizers could be grandly expressive instruments and almost that long since she announced her gender reassignment. She was also already well-known for her gloriously synthesized scores of films such as A Clockwork Orange , The Shining , and Tron .  Here she is reviewing her work with inventor Robert Moog, putting the Grammy jam into much richer context — including explaining how synthe