And a fun article on Zorn…

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/john-zorn-jazz-metal-interview-naked-city-1015329/

This is probably the best thing I’ve ever seen on Zorn’s ‘Cobra’ musical improvisation game.

A pretty decent profile of Laurie Anderson.

One winter day, Anderson invited me to her studio at the end of Canal Street, right where it meets the Hudson River. She has been working here since the 1970s — since the downtown glory days of Warhol, Basquiat, CBGB, Patti Smith, the Ramones, David Bowie, etc. etc. etc. I sat there petting her scruffy terrier, Little Will, while Anderson talked to me about basically everything in the universe. She told me about ponies (“If ponies were people they’d all be in jail”) and donkeys (“They have the best memory in the animal kingdom”) and about how the Hudson River is full of seahorses — not the elegant tropical wiggly jewels that you tend to see in aquariums, but New York City seahorses. Survivors. “Funky, brown, crusty,” she said.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/06/magazine/laurie-anderson.html

I’m not necessarily convinced by Stoller’s approach to solutions, which is always lots more regulation, but he’s great at highlighting important problems.

There is a third explanation for inflation and shortages, and it’s not simply that the Fed has printed too much money or that Covid introduced a supply shock (though both are likely factors.) It’s a political and policy story. The consolidation of power over supply chains in the hands of Wall Street, and the thinning out of how we make and produce things over forty years in the name of efficiency, has made our economy much less resilient to shocks. These shortages are the result.

https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/counterfeit-capitalism-why-a-monopolized

If this is a moment for power structures to be challenged, and old orthodoxies to be overturned, then understanding the difference between economic radicalism and social radicalism is vital. This could also be described as the difference between identity and class. That is not to dismiss the former: Many groups face discrimination on both measures. Women might not be hired because “Math isn’t for girls” or because an employer doesn’t want to pay for maternity leave. An employer may not see the worth of a minority applicant, because they don’t speak the way the interviewer expects, or that applicant might be a second-generation immigrant whose parents can’t subsidize them through several years of earning less than a living wage.

All this I’ve learned from feminism, where the contrast between economic and social radicalism is very apparent. Equal pay is economically radical. Hiring a female or minority CEO for the first time is socially radical. Diversity training is socially radical, at best. Providing social-housing tenants with homes not covered in flammable cladding is economically radical. Changing the name of a building at a university is socially radical; improving on its 5 percent enrollment rate for Black students—perhaps by smashing up the crazy system of legacy admissions—would be economically radical.

How Capitalism Drives Cancel Culture

Someone who has been made uncomfortable now has multiple paths through which to demand redress. This has given rise to a new facet of life in universities, nonprofits, and corporate offices: the committees, HR departments, and Title IX administrators who have been appointed precisely to hear these kinds of complaints. Anyone who feels discomfort now has a place to go, someone to talk to.

Some of this is, I repeat, positive: Employees or students who feel they have been treated unfairly no longer have to flounder alone. But that comes at a cost. Anyone who accidentally creates discomfort—whether through their teaching methods, their editorial standards, their opinions, or their personality—may suddenly find themselves on the wrong side of not just a student or a colleague but an entire bureaucracy, one dedicated to weeding out people who make other people uncomfortable. And these bureaucracies are illiberal. They do not necessarily follow rules of fact-based investigation, rational argument, or due process. Instead, the formal and informal administrative bodies that judge the fate of people who have broken social codes are very much part of a swirling, emotive public conversation, one governed not by the rules of the courtroom or logic or the Enlightenment but by social-media algorithms that encourage anger and emotion, and by the economy of likes and shares that pushes people to feel—and to perform—outrage. The interaction between the angry mob and the illiberal bureaucracy engenders a thirst for blood, for sacrifices to be offered up to the pious and unforgiving gods of outrage—a story we see in other eras of history, from the Inquisition to the more recent past.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/10/new-puritans-mob-justice-canceled/619818/

The combination of chromatophores, iridophores and photophores (and non-ocular light perceiving organs) makes for a strongly interactive relationship with aqueous light, or rather lights, since squids engage with different types of light, and in ranges difficult for us to imagine or measure. But we can recognize that squids metabolize their aqueous environment through both water and light. Just as their squishiness, in Aristotle’s terms, could be understood as water with the agency to perceive, judge and act, so their luminescence can be understood as light altered—digested, if you will—into intentional actions. Squids engage with changing, moving light as receptors, conveyors and projectors of light. They receive it, diffract it and create it. And they do so differently in different directions, at different depths and through different means. Their movements on a daily, seasonal and ontogenetic basis all participate in the environmental movements of lights, some of which we can perceive with our non-squid eyes and instruments designed to translate polarized light (as well as the light received in the non-visual photoreceptors), and much of which we cannot. The dynamics of the squid environment involve light and water interacting, and squids participate in those dynamics by metabolizing the continual changes into motion.

http://oceans.nautil.us/article/686/the-light-magic-of-squid

This long Twitter thread from a researcher is partly about the object-level question of mask effectiveness, but more interesting to me as a look at the meta-level question of how to evaluate the effectiveness of an intervention that’s poorly suited to randomized controlled trials.

LONG THREAD on masks. Mute if not interested.
Do masks work? Why do some people claim they don’t work? Do they cause harm? What kinds of masks should we wear? How does masking need to change now we know that Covid is airborne? When can we stop wearing them?
Get your popcorn.
1/

— Trisha Greenhalgh (@trishgreenhalgh) July 11, 2021

Traumatic insemination, also known as hypodermic insemination, is the mating practice in some species of invertebrates in which the male pierces the female’s abdomen with his aedeagus and injects his sperm through the wound into her abdominal cavity (hemocoel). The sperm diffuse through the female’s hemolymph, reaching the ovaries and resulting in fertilization.

The process is detrimental to the female’s health. It creates an open wound which impairs the female until it heals, and is susceptible to infection. The injection of sperm and ejaculatory fluids into the hemocoel can also trigger an immune reaction in the female. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traumatic_insemination

Sam Altman has one of the best-thought-out plans I’ve seen for keeping our society viable over the next decades in the face of technological change from AI. Recommended. Very interested to hear other people’s thoughts.

My work at OpenAI reminds me every day about the magnitude of the socioeconomic change that is coming sooner than most people believe. Software that can think and learn will do more and more of the work that people now do. Even more power will shift from labor to capital. If public policy doesn’t adapt accordingly, most people will end up worse off than they are today.

We need to design a system that embraces this technological future and taxes the assets that will make up most of the value in that world–companies and land–in order to fairly distribute some of the coming wealth. Doing so can make the society of the future much less divisive and enable everyone to participate in its gains.

https://moores.samaltman.com/