May 31, 2017 On the Shelf We’re All Molded by the Pizza Gods, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring From a seventies-era ad for Straw Hat Pizza. You may want pizza. I grant you that. But it may be that pizza wants you. It may be that the pizza gods have shaped the very essence of your desire, pulling you aside at every possible moment to whisper pizza, pizza, pizza. You want pizza because you can order pizza from a pull-down menu full of fun customizable pizza options. David Rudin argues that our computers and phones, with their machine logic, are an ideal vehicle for pizza, which is widely understood and easy to assemble. After all, he explains, Domino’s “now offers a series of apps, chatbots, and even the option of tweeting an order using the pizza emoji. Some of these ordering options may exist primarily as marketing gimmicks, but their aggregate effect remains notable: any interface to which you have access can likely be used to order pizza. This in part stems from pizza’s popularity, but taste is only a small part of the story: the delivery pizza is highly adaptable to the logic and formatted language of communication interfaces. The typical consumer’s mental model of a pizza—dough with sauce, cheese, and toppings baked in an oven—is quite similar to a machine’s conception of pizza, which is quite similar to how a pizza is actually made. The algorithm for pizza is not complex … All parties in the transaction are imagining the same simple process and speaking from the same restricted phrase book.” Toni Morrison remembers a childhood job cleaning another woman’s house and the lessons it taught her about separating work and identity: “A larger part of my pride was based on the fact that I gave half my wages to my mother, which meant that some of my earnings were used for real things—an insurance-policy payment or what was owed to the milkman or the iceman. The pleasure of being necessary to my parents was profound. I was not like the children in folktales: burdensome mouths to feed, nuisances to be corrected, problems so severe that they were abandoned to the forest. I had a status that doing routine chores in my house did not provide—and it earned me a slow smile, an approving nod from an adult. Confirmations that I was adultlike, not childlike … I suspect that children aren’t needed in that way now. They are loved, doted on, protected, and helped. Fine, and yet … ” Read More
May 30, 2017 On the Shelf The Nazis Are Still Ruining Art, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Michele Marieschi, La Punta Della Dogana e San Giorgio Maggiore. Even now, more than seventy years after the end of World War II, the Nazis have found new ways to ruin things. Art, for example. In July, Sotheby’s will sell Michele Marieschi’s eighteenth-century painting La Punta Della Dogana e San Giorgio Maggiore. You might wish to buy it—it’s a nice painting, on the face of it, containing boats, water, the sky, and other attractive things often found in paintings. But read the fine print. The painting was looted by the Nazis decades ago, and the Jewish family who’d originally owned it has fought for generations to get it back. Now that it’s been recovered, you’d think the family could simply reclaim it. But the art market has other ideas, and the painting’s market value has escalated; rather than return it, Sotheby’s has brokered an uneasy settlement with the family. Nina Siegal has the story in detail: “It was 1937, Vienna, when a Jewish couple named Heinrich and Anna Maria Graf bought a vibrant eighteenth-century oil painting of the Grand Canal in Venice with the Punta Della Dogana in the background. The work held pride of place in their living room, the highlight of their small but treasured art collection. One year later, Germany annexed Austria, and the Grafs and their twin six-year-old daughters, Erika and Eva, had to flee the country. They put their art into storage … By the time they settled in Forest Hills, Queens, it was 1942, and all their possessions had been looted by the Nazis … Looted artworks that have been in private hands for decades are coming to market after settlement agreements with the rightful owners, in a way that tries to address their tainted past. These agreements may not result in the return of the paintings to the heirs, but the compromise does provide at least a form of resolution and some compensation to the heirs, and brings the artworks out of hiding.” Philip Gourevitch, a former editor of The Paris Review, remembers reading Denis Johnson’s debut novel, Angels, in an ecstatic single sitting when he was twenty-one. He liked it so much that he decided he had to speak to Johnson—immediately. Gourevitch writes, “Who was this guy? Who wrote this language that carried traces of many writers I’d read before but was its own world entirely? If this was his first book, he must want to hear how good it is. The bio beneath his photo said he lived on Cape Cod. I picked up the phone and called information. I dialed the number the operator gave me, a woman answered, and when I said his name, she asked who was calling, and I said, ‘A reader’ … The only thing that he said that I remember exactly was when I asked him how long it had taken to write the book. He asked me if I was a writer, and I said that that remained to be seen. Then he answered my question: ‘Twelve years,’ he said. Later that night, I told a friend about my strange phone call, and when I got to the bit about twelve years, I said, ‘You see, it’s hopeless.’ But that wasn’t really what I felt, and I knew it. What I had felt when I hung up the phone was that I had got what I wanted. What I felt was: it was worth it.” Read More
May 26, 2017 On the Shelf Denis the Pirate, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Denis Johnson in 2014. Photo: Cindy Johnson. Farrar, Straus and Giroux has confirmed that Denis Johnson is dead at sixty-seven. We’ll celebrate Johnson’s life and work in the days to come. For now, can I recommend a deep cut? It’s “Denis the Pirate,” a kind of children’s story from our Fall 2003 issue in which Johnson imagines “the most bloodthirsty and terrible pirate ever to sail the Caribbean Sea … my own great-great-great-great grandfather, Denis the Pirate. In the early 1700s no man lived who did not fear his name.” In a short foreword, Johnson explained, “I wrote this story for my goddaughter Josephine Messer many years ago, while we were visiting the island of Bequia in the country of St. Vincent and the Grenadines. She was about five at the time, and I hoped the misadventures of my great-great-great-great-grandfather would amuse her. I changed the location to match our surroundings, but in every other respect the details of my ancestor’s unsavory career are absolutely accurate.” Meanwhile, Jason Horowitz is in Taormina, a hilltop town on the coast of Sicily, where soon President Trump will arrive—and where characters out of Denis Johnson stories seem to be in abundance: “Taormina’s postcard panoramas, its exaggerated Epcot Italian-ness and its reputation as the sun-drenched pleasure dome for reality TV stars, aging playboys and affluent Russians remain intact. It is a spot that is both exclusive and a little hokey … ‘That’s the room Trump will stay in,’ said Dino Papale, a sixty-nine-year-old Sicilian lawyer, promoter and all around bon vivant, as he leaned around his courtyard’s wall and pointed at the adjacent Belmond Grand Hotel Timeo. Mr. Papale, who pulled a red ‘Make America Great Again’ cap over his wavy gray hair, said he met Mr. Trump several years ago and was invited to his inauguration. ‘I’m the president of Trump’s Sicilian fan club,’ said Mr. Papale, who is also first among the many Taormina types for whom the president is a kindred spirit.” Read More
May 25, 2017 On the Shelf The Robots Are Color-Blind, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Robots hate these. Colors: you may not like them, but they’re all we’ve got. Chartreuse, cerise, burnt sienna, ultramarine … our ability to detect and name these things is all that’s keeping us from melting back into the primordial soup. It makes sense, then, that artificial intelligences would mock us for our rainbow. Robots can’t stand color. This is a known fact. They apprehend the vivid reds and blues of the world as mere data, and they hold humans in contempt for finding the beauty in such things. If you need proof, consider the case of Janelle Shane, who attempted to design a neural network that could name new paint colors. And what did the machine do? It spat out new colors full of derision and mockery: Bank Butt. Turdly. Burf Pink. Stoner Blue. Clardic Fug. Caring Tan. Testing. Stanky Bean. Dorkwood. Sand Dan. Dense Blats. Sindis Poop. It was as if the robot was wandering the aisles of Sherwin-Williams and laughing, laughing, laughing, taking all that we hold dear and spitting on it with ersatz robot saliva. Claire Voon has more on Janelle Shane’s experiment, and more of the horrors it wrought: “She fed a learning algorithm a list of about 7,700 Sherwin-Williams paint color names and their RGB values, and watched as it formed its own rules and generated different sets of data. ‘Could the neural network learn to invent new paint colors and give them attractive names?’ she posited, giving examples of existing ones—Tuscan sunrise, Blushing pear, Tradewind. It would be neat if AI could alleviate a bit of stress from individuals chewing on pencils as they conceive of the next great paint name. But Shane’s results, for the most part, suggest that companies may want to leave AI out of the christening process for now.” In happier, more human news, here’s Danuta Kean on a pair of newly discovered Sylvia Plath poems, which two academics found on a piece of carbon paper at the back of one of her notebooks: “Using Photoshop, [they] deciphered the typing on the paper, which is watermarked with an image that might have appeared in a Plath poem—a woman gazing at her own reflection in a pool of water. First revealed was ‘To a Refractory Santa Claus,’ a poem about Spain and fairer weather—a subject that Plath returned to later in ‘Fiesta Melons’ and ‘Alicante Lullaby.’ Written after Plath and Hughes’s honeymoon in Benidorm, it consists of two eleven-line verses and pleads for escape from the cruelties of an English winter to the fresh fruit and sunshine of warmer climes … The second poem proved harder to decipher. Titled ‘Megrims,’ it is a monologue addressed to a doctor by a paranoid speaker about a series of ‘irregular incidents’ that range from the discovery of a spider in a coffee cup to an owl about to strike.” Read More
May 24, 2017 On the Shelf I Can Name Your Disease, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring It’s right on the tip of my tongue … I’ve always thought I would be good at naming diseases. The problem with most disease names is that they have all these scary words in them: flu, disorder, virus. That’s bad for business. If I were in charge, I’d name them after deodorants (Aqua Reef, Cool Burst, Sport) or Yankee Candles (Bahama Breeze, Vanilla Cupcake, Clean Cotton). But get this: It’s not just one person naming all the world’s diseases. It’s a whole committee of international bureaucracies, which explains why so many of our world’s most dangerous illnesses have such lousy titles. Laura Spinney writes on the winding, often fraught course through which a disease gets its name: “The Spanish flu stands as a monument to the ugly history of disease naming. The world was at war in 1918, and the belligerent nations censored their press, not wanting to damage their populations’ morale … The world came to see the disease as pulsing out from Spain, a belief that was encouraged by propagandists in other countries whom it suited to shift the blame. The naming of diseases has always been as much about politics and the human need to identify a scapegoat as it has been about accurately labeling a new threat to life. Periodic attempts have been made to remove the subjective from the process. Three United Nations agencies—the World Health Organization (WHO), the Food and Agriculture Organization, and the World Organization for Animal Health—play a particularly important role when it comes to infectious diseases, which don’t respect borders. WHO hosts the International Classification of Diseases (ICD), which has long assigned the final name to any human disease. And in 2015, WHO came up with an updated set of guidelines for labeling infectious diseases, which account for the vast majority of threats to human life.” Thought experiment: Say a kind of distant friend of yours gives you a big statue of Karl Marx. Do you accept it? Should you be happy about it? What if Karl Marx is kind of a contentious figure for you because half your nation embraced Communism not long ago, with disastrous results? Didi Kirsten Tatlow writes on a minor controversy unfolding between China and Germany: “For weeks, Chinese have been debating the meaning of a superhero-size statue of Karl Marx headed to Trier, the German town where the political philosopher was born. An attempt to spread Communist revolution back to democratic Germany? A joke? The eighteen-foot work by the sculptor Wu Weishan is a gift from the Chinese government and is to be unveiled next May as part of wider commemorations for the two hundredth anniversary of Marx’s birth … This noble-looking Marx gazing into the future expresses ‘the confidence of today’s China in its own theories, path, system and culture,’ Mr. Wu wrote in People’s Daily, the party newspaper … Historians and politicians asked whether it was appropriate to honor so uncritically a man whose ideas led to dictatorship, including in the former East Germany. In April, Trier’s City Council gave final approval to the gift but whittled down its size by more than two feet.” Read More
May 23, 2017 On the Shelf The President Is a Computer, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring President Donald J. Trump, right, with boyhood friend. Does the president pass the Turing test? I’m afraid not. When I listen to his answers to basic questions and compare those answers to a real human’s, it’s plain to see that he’s a computer—most likely, my research suggests, a Tandy 1000 EX purchased from a RadioShack in Secaucus, New Jersey, sometime in December 1986. If this is the case, it explains a lot of his more mystifying decision-making procedures. The neurologist Robert A. Burton sees plenty of evidence that the president uses machine learning, making him a rudimentary artificial intelligence: “Trump doesn’t operate within conventional human cognitive constraints, but rather is a new life form, a rudimentary artificial intelligence-based learning machine. When we strip away all moral, ethical and ideological considerations from his decisions and see them strictly in the light of machine learning, his behavior makes perfect sense. Consider how deep learning occurs in neural networks such as Google’s DeepMind or IBM’s Deep Blue and Watson. In the beginning, each network analyzes a number of previously recorded games, and then, through trial and error, the network tests out various strategies. Connections for winning moves are enhanced; losing connections are pruned away. The network has no idea what it is doing or why one play is better than another. It isn’t saddled with any confounding principles such as what constitutes socially acceptable or unacceptable behavior or which decisions might result in negative downstream consequences … As there are no lines of reasoning driving the network’s actions, it is not possible to reverse engineer the network to reveal the ‘why’ of any decision.” There’s a new Haruki Murakami book out, and, as Christian Lorentzen notes, you can pretty much guess how it’s gonna go: “In the novels there will always be cats, mundane kitchen activities, dingy barrooms, pop and/or classical theme tunes set against a surreal, Manichaean danger zone into which the humble yet increasingly resourceful hero must plunge in search of what he’s missing, most likely to find something else. The hero will spend some time at the bottom of a well, or some other deep and lonely space. His mind and heart will be tugged between desire for an ethereal, spiritual woman (usually the one who’s gone missing) and attraction to a sassy, sexy, down-to-earth gal (who at first seems more like a sidekick on his vision quest but may turn out to be just what he needed all along) … There’s always a bit of Chandler, Kafka, and Salinger mixed into Murakami’s fiction, and it’s tempting to say that the Salinger quotient has been growing too pronounced. But for all the dark elements at play in Murakami’s book—rape, murder, suicide, incest, mental illness, war trauma, etc.—Salinger’s vision of adolescence and arrested development in the Glass family stories is ultimately darker.” Read More