December 1, 2016 On the Shelf Robots Are Superior Buddhists, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring That’s a good robot. Whenever someone asks me how I’m doing, I say, Good! The robots haven’t eradicated me or my species yet! I’ve been going on this way my whole adult life—but now Genevieve Bell, an anthropologist who studies tech, has convinced me that my real fear isn’t the robots. It’s staring right back at me when I look in the mirror. “Western culture has some anxieties about what happens when humans try to bring something to life … What we are seeing now isn’t an anxiety about artificial intelligence per se, it’s about what it says about us. That if you can make something like us, where does it leave us? And that concern isn’t universal, as other cultures have very different responses to AI, to big data. The most obvious one to me would be the Japanese robotic tradition, where people are willing to imagine the role of robots as far more expansive than you find in the West. For example, the Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori published a book called The Buddha in the Robot, where he suggests that robots would be better Buddhists than humans because they are capable of infinite invocations … Mori’s argument was that we project our own anxieties and when we ask: ‘Will the robots kill us?’ what we are really asking is: ‘Will we kill us?’ ” The CIA tried for years to assassinate Castro—with a poison pen, an exploding underwater seashell (I’m not making this shit up), and a cigar tainted with botulism. It was only fair that the New York Times began drafting his obit in 1959: for a minute there it seemed as if he was not long for this world. Now the Times remembers its many false alarms: “The development of the Castro obituary is as legendary as the man himself. Countless colleagues—spanning many different technologies and platforms—have massaged it and passed the baton. Each of the many death scares gave us the opportunity to dust off the package and reassess our digital strategy based on ever-changing audience consumption habits and storytelling tools.” Read More
November 30, 2016 On the Shelf High on Hunter’s Supply, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Why not smoke what this guy did? Even when an author’s life is over, his lifestyle can live on. I don’t mean through his books—I’m not some starry-eyed undergrad! No, I mean through merchandise. Hunter S. Thompson died in 2005, but his widow, Anita Thompson, is now ready to bring his estate into the emerging market of boutique cannabis strains: a more lucrative field than any kind of publishing could be. Andrew Travers reports, “Thompson said she … saved six different strains of cannabis that the Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas author actually smoked. She is now working with a cannabis company to grow those strains—or hybrids of them—and sell them to the public. She said she was glad that she held off on partnering on a marijuana brand until it could be done right … ‘I was always steering toward his work and away from his lifestyle, but now I feel like I can talk more openly about his lifestyle,’ she said. ‘I’m proud to do it now. Before, it was a little too risky.’ She added with a laugh: ‘I’m looking forward to being a drug lord.’ ” (No word yet on whether he was an indica or a sativa guy.) Today in small marvels of directorial dedication: Pedro Almodóvar. Here, at last, is a director willing to go the distance with his actors. Per D. T. Max: “Almodóvar goes to remarkable lengths to offer guidance. In 1985, he was filming the final scene in Matador, with Assumpta Serna. He was not sure whether Nacho Martínez, playing the wounded matador who was about to make love to her, should graze her crotch directly with his mouth or do so with a rosebud between his teeth. Almodóvar tried it out himself. ‘I realized it was better to put some distance between the actor’s tongue and the girl’s sex,’ he said, during an appearance on a Spanish talk show. ‘I do it all,’ he added.” Read More
November 29, 2016 On the Shelf The Poetry of Urine, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring A physician examines his uric haul. Don’t ever say I haven’t done anything for you. I found you this, this, this … lovely thing … this meditation on urine by Dr. Jonathan Reisman, which I will aver to be the finest piece of urine-centric writing produced in 2016: “I practiced wielding the dipstick and centrifuge, and trained my eyes to recognize clues under the microscope … I began to comprehend urine’s enigmatic language … Today, thankfully, this is no longer necessary, though decoding urine still often feels like being a sommelier … By editing urine out of the bloodstream, kidneys preserve the primordial sea in our blood, maintaining the balance of salt essential to our survival. Without them, and without urine’s salubrious flow, our forebears could never have left the ocean to live on land, just as each newborn baby could never adjust to life outside its personal salty, amniotic sea—itself composed almost wholly from the unborn baby’s urine. So when urine flow slows in illness (when patients report poor urine output or parents tell of fewer wet diapers in sick infants), it is the body fighting to maintain the life-giving ocean inside each of us, our ancestral brine.” Everyone knows about survivor’s guilt—the less talked-about phenomenon is survivor’s thrill, that frisson that runs through you when you witness a disaster and remain here, alive, spectating, safe, to tell everyone else about it afterward. Elisa Gabbert writes, “It’s the spectacle, I think, that makes a disaster a disaster. A disaster is not defined simply by damage or death count; deaths by smoking or car wrecks are not a disaster, because they are meted out, predictable. Nor are mass shootings generally considered disasters. A disaster must not only blindside us but be witnessed in public … In the vocabulary of disaster, one very important word is debris, from the French debriser, to break down. A cherishable word, it sounds so light and delicate. But the World Trade Center produced hundreds of millions of tons of it. The bits of paper falling around the city led some people to mistake the initial hit for a parade.” Read More
November 28, 2016 On the Shelf The Boston Molasses Plot Thickens, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring The aftermath of the Boston Molasses Disaster. In January 1919, a freak molasses accident claimed the lives of twenty-one people in Boston: a steel holding tank burst open, flooding the streets (and the nation’s nightmares) with 2.3 million gallons of treacle. Scientists have never really figured out why the spill was so deadly, but a team of researchers from the American Physical Society have an idea, writes Erin McCann: “By studying the effects of cold weather on molasses, the researchers determined that the disaster was more fatal in the winter than it would have been during a warmer season. The syrup moved quickly enough to cover several blocks within seconds and thickened into a harder goo as it cooled, slowing down the wave but also hindering rescue efforts … The cooler temperature of the outside air raised the viscosity of the molasses, essentially trapping people who had not been able to escape the wave. About half the people who were killed ‘died basically because they were stuck.’ ” Forrest Gander has translated some never-before-seen Neruda poems, and while he’s not ready to quote them, he’s willing to offer a few tantalizing descriptions, because that is his right: “There’s a love poem that turned my solar plexus into a cavern. There’s an ode to Neruda’s wife’s ear that depends upon a conceit that most Chileans today wouldn’t fathom, since few remember the 1940s vernacular for abalone: ‘little ears of the sea.’ There’s a poem in which Neruda recalls his arrival at the age of seventeen in Santiago. He’d come hoping to cut his teeth on big-city poetry, but when he stepped off the train, he walked into squadrons of mounted police swinging batons at protesters in a widespread violence organized by the ruling elite, the nitrate barons, in a period that came to be called the ‘White Terror.’ There are inclusive Whitmanesque paeans to working men and women, and there’s a hilarious tirade against the depredations of the telephone.” Read More
November 23, 2016 On the Shelf Literature Is Money, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring From the cover of Secondhand Time. There’s a great Tom Waits song called “What’s He Building in There?” that I’ve thought about a lot as we ponder the Trump transition: “He’s hiding from us,” Waits growls. “I’ll tell you one thing, he’s not building a playhouse for the children.” The architecture critic Martin Filler is asking the same question about Trump, looking back at a career of eyesores and evils: “Grotesque though the rise of Donald Trump has seemed to many, his political ascendance has struck those of us who love architecture as a particularly personal affront, given our familiarity with his forty-year record as the foremost architectural schlockmeister and urban design vulgarian of his generation … One of course cannot help but wonder what Trump will impose architecturally on our national landscape, especially since he has promised to create vast infrastructure projects, most notoriously his “big, beautiful, powerful wall” along the 1,989-mile expanse of our border with Mexico … Despite uncertainties about exactly what travails the Trump presidency will bring us, I am convinced that the architectural imprint he has already imposed—extrapolated to a national scale—tells us all we need to know.” There’s no good reason not to fear the alt-right and their white-nationalist fantasies—but Jacob Bacharach, a gay, Jewish novelist, spent his high school years immured in what he calls “teenage Nazi” culture, and his message is comforting: these dudes are a bunch of insecure mouth-breathing losers who couldn’t revolutionize their way out of a paper bag. Bacharach recalls a DIY film project he and his friends undertook in 1999, his senior year: “The movie inevitably made its way to our principal. There were plenty of bits to get a decent and unimaginative man riled up—rituals cribbed from Anton LeVay, drug use both simulated and actual, violence, and plenty of fake blood. But I have to believe that the worst moment for that poor administrator and for our poor parents was when they watched another friend of ours, a nice girl from a devoutly Christian family—Lord knows how we cajoled her into participating—crawl between my legs to perform simulated fellatio on a TV remote control. I suspect we meant all this as some kind of commentary on the media. The camera panned up to my contorted face. ‘Oh yeah, baby,’ I growled, ‘Suck it. Heil Hitler, my dick is your Fuhrer.’ ” Read More
November 22, 2016 On the Shelf We Don’t Really Know Anything About Anything, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring José Ferraz de Almeida Júnior, Girl with a Book, ca. 1875. William Trevor, an Irish writer who saw the short-story form as a chance to perfect “the art of the glimpse,” has died at eighty-eight. “His plots often unfolded in Irish or English villages whose inhabitants, most of them hanging on to the bottom rung of the lower middle class, waged unequal battle with capricious fate. In ‘The Ballroom of Romance,’ one of his most famous stories, a young woman caring for her crippled father looks for love in a dance hall but settles, week after week, for a few drunken kisses from a local bachelor. The hero of ‘The Day We Got Drunk on Cake’ repeatedly phones a young woman he admires in between drinking sessions at a series of pubs. The relationship deepens and, during a final call in the wee hours, takes a sudden, unexpected turn.” Let’s put some things in perspective about human knowledge. Sure, there are plenty of things we know as facts (New York thin crust is superior to Chicago deep dish) and others we can be basically sure of (Donald Trump prowls the outer boroughs at night in a latex superhero costume, torturing stray cats and hyperventilating into a paper bag), but many even more basic matters remain mysterious to us. Consciousness, for instance. We don’t know shit about consciousness. In a new series, Tim Parks asks the philosopher Riccardo Manzotti to take him into the riddle: “Why doesn’t our behavior simply happen, taking its course the way the planets follow their orbits? We don’t know. Just as cosmologists don’t know what dark matter is. All we know is that there is something that doesn’t add up and very likely points to some profound error in our assumptions about reality … The truth is that we just don’t know a priori the nature of physical reality. This is a point Bertrand Russell made very strongly back in the 1920s. The more we investigate the physical, the more varied and complex it appears.” Read More