“Interview with Seth Wieck, author of Call Out Coyote.” I’m in the middle of savoring Call Out Coyote right now. Seth’s poems roll off the tongue and stick like a burr in the heart. Elizabeth Stice asks him a series of great questions about his poetry. Here’s his response to, “Can there even be placeless art?”: “I may reverse the question. I’m not sure a place can be a place without art. A natural setting certainly doesn’t need human artifacts to exist, but for a place to become a place–for it to survive in human memory across a generational gap–I think it needs to have art. Wallace Stegner said a place isn’t a place until it has had a poet. More specifically, until it has had that highest human attention which is poetry. A place has to be named and then that name has to be passed on. Stegner supposed it would take three generations in a place to produce a poet. In that way, I think poetry which forgets its duty to make a people and a place is useless.”
“In Praise of Poetry and Form.”Steven Knepper reviews Amit Majmudar’s new book and riffs on how humans play within the constraints set down by sport or religion or artistic traditions: “Good form is important in pumping iron, in performing religious rituals, and in writing verse. Majmudar has no quarrel with well-crafted free verse; he writes some of it himself. Yet he relishes a wide variety of traditional forms. While he does not shoot (many) darts at free versers, they have rarely been so gracious toward formalists in recent decades. In many workshops and classrooms, form is seen as a straitjacket, or at least as stuffy, boring, backward-looking. But Majmudar continually reminds us that the links between poetry, rhythm, and sonic richness are as ancient as humankind.”
“Hope for Freedom for Iran, but Expect a Mess for America.” Bonnie Kristian addresses the discouraging cycle of American warfare: “the sheer durability of this pattern—of the American people voting for presidents who promise peace, only to have those very presidents start more wars—is discouraging. Hopeless, even. That’s the word I want to use, overwhelmed with a sense of déjà vu here at the end of yet another article about lawless presidential warmaking in the Middle East.”
“Who’s Excited to Be Replaced By AI? These Guys!” Evan Gardner has dispiriting conversations at a ClawCon: “’I haven’t made any money yet,’ said the man with Kevin on his jacket. But once he trains his agent to perfect passive income—helping him automatically block his losses on Robinhood, and even make profitable trades, he said—his life’s pleasures will be limitless. If his bot goes according to plan, he’ll do nothing but socialize. ‘I’d rather be out drinking beer and hanging out. That’s the American dream,’ he told me. ‘I’m sure you would, too,’ he added, toasting my Corona with a smile.”
“Outsourcing Life.” Nadya Williams looks at all the tasks we’re offloading to machines and turns to an ancient Roman poet for some wisdom about where this might lead: “What’s next? Once you outsource everything that could possibly be outsourced to machines, what is left for you personally to do, oh human? How will you live your life if you do not need to drive, mow the lawn, do any household tasks, take care of children or elderly relatives or anyone else at all, read any books or emails, write anything ever again, or do any other creative or thinking work or leisurely activity? What else is there to do with your life, when the regular stuff of daily living is removed from you as an obstacle to, presumably, something better—except no one has bothered clarifying just what that may be.”
“Tech Legend Stewart Brand on Musk, Bezos and his Extraordinary Life: ‘We don’t need to passively accept our fate.’” Steve Rose profiles the now 87-year-old Brand and talks with him about his various projects, including his new book: “His new book is titled Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One. It is the first of a planned 13 instalments, Brand explains, and it deals with the most literal, material forms of maintenance. Subsequent instalments will investigate everything from buildings to communities, institutions to the human body, plus planetary and environmental maintenance. So perhaps not such a departure after all in terms of long, big thinking. ‘I fell into it realising it was a tremendously ambitious thing, because I was going to be writing about a range of things I know nothing about,’ he jokes.”
“Science Has a Major Fraud Problem.” Joe Nocera surveys the way peer review and scientific institutions have been undermined by widespread fraud. AI is likely both to make this problem worse and also to help sleuths expose fraud: “Science has a fraud problem. Scientific progress requires experiments that rigorously and objectively test hypotheses. Yet a surprising number of experiments conducted today are neither rigorous nor objective. Science is now rife with retracted papers, doctored images, and hyped results. Scientists have sometimes replaced the images from one experiment with images from a different one to make the results look better. They have made claims unjustified by the underlying research. And far too often, they’ve designed experiments that aren’t really experiments at all because the results are preordained.”
“Life with the Machines.” I think Ian Harber is at times naive about the ease of distinguishing among different categories of work, but his reflections on Kingsnorth’s new book and on different modes of relating to technologies raise vital questions: “Of course, there is concern about AI taking many, many jobs away. I, in no way, want to minimize how transformative that could be in our society. Our economy could be radically upended. But we should be asking why we want humans doing the work of machines in the first place. Let the machines do machine work so the humans can do human work. Relating, creating, building, molding, sculpting, rearranging, and contemplating. That, I think, is the role of the Preservationist. Preserve the Good, True, and Beautiful—or as Kingsnorth himself put it: People, Place, Past, and Prayer—and let the machines push the pixels.”
“Sucker.” McKay Coppins got $10,000 to try out gambling. He describes the results, and his essay also includes Chesterton’s fence, his Mormon bishop, and Nate Silver: “Practically overnight, we took an ancient vice—long regarded as soul-rotting and civilizationally ruinous—put it on everyone’s phone, and made it as normal and frictionless as checking the weather. What could possibly go wrong?”
