flâneur

Daniel Bashir

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on the atlas — 89

highlights — 1268

  • On the couple’s therapy couch of life, Klein is not there to win. He’s there to grow. To figure it out, with us, side by side, in a journey that, given his medium (just me, my earbuds, and E.) can feel uniquely intimate. “Men can be very edgy in conversations about stuff like Gaza and Kamala,” says Kathryn C., she of the Ezra hall pass. “Like, you feel the invasion of your intellectual space. There can be a thing about winning the conversation. I think Ezra is comfortable with gray areas. He is never blaming anyone, even when he’s pointing out mistakes. He’s truly curious, not just looking to …
    Is Everybody Horny for Ezra Klein?
  • That bold and prescient move cemented Klein’s stature as a breakout media star of the 2024 election cycle, and as perhaps the most influential Democratic media figure, a place occupied over the decades by Times luminaries from Scotty Reston to Anthony Lewis.
    The New York Times’ Ezra Klein problem | Semafor
  • I don’t have faith that my sense of history, from here inside history, is accurate, or that the view through the rickety apparatus of my body is clear. Eagleman notes that “most of what you see, your conscious perception, is computed on a need-­to­-know basis.” We ignore what our brains—independently!—deem unnecessary. There is no other self, to tell yourself what to do.
    The Paris Review - The Unreality of Time - The Paris Review
  • I do worry that civilization is doomed. (The word “worry” seems inadequate; I almost wrote “believe.”) But I’m not sure the doom will occur like a moment, like an event, like a disaster. Like the impact of a bomb or an asteroid. I wonder if the way the world gets worse will barely outpace the rate at which we get used to it.
    The Paris Review - The Unreality of Time - The Paris Review
  • what we experience as the present is in fact the past, the very recent past, the just past. In a way, then, time is memory—not clock-­time, perhaps. Not Einstein’s time. But human time is human memory.
    The Paris Review - The Unreality of Time - The Paris Review
  • “now” is not a speck but a span, of about a tenth of a second. During that interval, Muller says, “your brain can perform manipulations that distort your perception of time and rearrange causality”—syncing up the audio and video, like a live broadcast on a slight delay. It’s as though your brain takes in the infor­mation and processes it a little before you do. Researchers have exploited this discovery to fool people into thinking a computer program can read their minds, that it knows what they’re going to do before they actually do it. We’re capable of perceiving an effect before we realize w…
    The Paris Review - The Unreality of Time - The Paris Review
  • McTaggart’s argument hinges in part on his claim that perception is “qualitatively different” from either memory or anticipation—this is the difference between past, pres­ent, and future, the way we apprehend events in time. Direct perceptions are those that fall within the “specious present,” a term coined by E. R. Clay and further devel­oped by William James (a fan of Bergson’s). “Everything is observed in a specious present,” McTaggart writes, “but nothing, not even the observations themselves, can ever be in a specious present.” It’s illusory—the events are fixed, and there is nothing magi…
    The Paris Review - The Unreality of Time - The Paris Review
  • I suspecting most of the hand-wringing about the failure of parameter editing to produce globally consistent outputs involves a model misidentification error of this type: we’re using map-manipulation techniques while trying to answer simulator-type questions. Model editing techniques that actually work (RAG and context distillation) clearly do so via a different interface that invokes counterfactual-level model, even though we don’t know how that model operates.
    Language Models, World Models, and Human Model-Building
  • we shouldn’t expect an LM to have one world model, but many—this way, for example, they can store knowledge statically in their parameters, but still reason in-context about information that contradicts these parameters. Different ways of interacting with LMs may, in general, invoke different models.
    Language Models, World Models, and Human Model-Building
  • it seems especially important to try to be as precise as possible about a model’s “level of resolution” when making interpretability claims.
    Language Models, World Models, and Human Model-Building
  • we can talk about world models at varying levels of expressiveness (the “prior”, “conditional”, and “counterfactual” levels above)—or, even more precisely, about which specific aspects of the data-generating process our model encodes, and what’s left out. Once we know what kind of model we’re looking for, it suffices to exhibit the internal representational circuit that implements the model, and show that we can configure it (the equivalent of crank turning) and inspect it (the equivalent of observation & measurement) to obtain the answers we expect.
    Language Models, World Models, and Human Model-Building
  • do neural sequence predictors encode and recapitulate the real causal process in the outside world that generated their data? Or do they do what they do by shuffling words and pixels around without ever passing through an intermediate representation or computation that looks like the one taking place in the outside world?
    Language Models, World Models, and Human Model-Building
  • do text-generation models represent situations and possible worlds described by text, and consult these representations to determine what might happen next?
    Language Models, World Models, and Human Model-Building
  • We have vision-and-language models of the kind that grounding fundamentalists (I used to be one) said would fix the outstanding problems with text generation. But at scale, the addition of visual supervision doesn’t seem to change the quality of text generation very much. So even with grounding—and in other domains like video generation or protein sequence modeling—we still can’t agree whether neural sequence predictors are really understanding or shallowly manipulating their inputs.
    Language Models, World Models, and Human Model-Building
  • It turned out that the hard part of this problem had nothing to do with LMs: it was figuring out what “meaning” means, and what these human-approved representations should look like in the first place. So the NLP interpretability community immediately started arguing about model-theoretic vs relational theories of meaning; whether it was enough for models’ internal representations to be isomorphic to human-designed meaning representations, or whether explicit links to perception and action were strictly necessary; etc. This was very interesting, and I think we learned a lot of general lessons …
    Language Models, World Models, and Human Model-Building
  • the creator logs thousands of hours at the laptop or the notepad or, if they’re feeling ambitious and antediluvian, the typewriter, and this process, for all the ways we quantify and commoditize everything in American life, remains mysterious, even in our budding artificial intelligence age. A writer sits and thinks and words, somehow, appear. Ideas can be kismet. Language percolates in the shadow of a thought, and these shadows do not have much to do with marketing directors. The attractions, obsessions, and even hatreds of the individual make what a novel is, and pieces of the creator, unpre…
    The War on Genius - Political Currents by Ross Barkan
  • as a fellow white male who cultivated a great love of literature in my collegiate years, I never felt any anxiety or shame if I met others who liked the books I did. In fact, I was excited. Literature can be a lonely pursuit, after all, and if community can be found, all the better. Sinykin’s implication, though, is that the “cocky young white men” who claimed Gravity’s Rainbow were a problem that needed to be solved. And the problem did get solved, though not in the way a liberal college professor might have wanted. These men now turn to Andrew Tate, Jordan Peterson, and Reddit. Why cling to …
    The War on Genius - Political Currents by Ross Barkan
  • What this does not mean, though, is that authorship should be downplayed to such a degree that the existence of singular talent independent of a publishing machine’s input is regarded as nearly impossible. I quote John Pistelli, here, on Sinykin’s dismissal of that romantic genius: “just because you’re not doesn’t mean nobody is!”
    The War on Genius - Political Currents by Ross Barkan
  • The conglomeration era, which began in earnest in the second half of the twentieth century—when smaller publishers began getting gobbled up by larger publishers, and corporations came to be dominant—did impact which books appeared in print and which didn’t, though it’s difficult to say a meaningful aesthetic revolution was brought about this way. The primary change in publishing, I’d argue, that has come in the new century is the diminishment of risk-taking on the side of literary fiction, the abandonment of the concept of a publishing house propping up and nurturing a young literary career, a…
    The War on Genius - Political Currents by Ross Barkan
  • it can say very little about what’s inside the actual books.
    The War on Genius - Political Currents by Ross Barkan
  • Pleasure is why we read literature, but the pleasures literature delivers are complex and not easily described, defined, or fixed in time and place. As Guillory writes, the pleasures of literature are often only gained at the expense of pains: the initial pain of learning to read, the pain of understanding difficult books, the pain of grasping the literary history from which books emerge, the pain of looking at something we can’t yet comprehend though we know we could, the pain of examining the nature of our own pleasure. Perhaps it’s these pains that turn our eyes away from the pleasures of l…
    Literature Without Literature | Christian Lorentzen | Granta
  • One of the reasons we read literature is to experience the author’s purchase on society and to see how it corresponds with our own. Literature’s perennial advantage over sociology is that it can do this through the means of irony, paradox, and beauty. It is not restricted to the empirical, it is free to invent, it has recourse to fantasies that are truer than real life. It is less enamored with disclosing the obvious. The greater the novelist, the richer the picture of the world depicted within it, but also the more resistant the work becomes to being reduced to sociology. There is a reason wh…
    Literature Without Literature | Christian Lorentzen | Granta
  • Pierre Bourdieu, who drew upon and expanded Thorstein Veblen’s ideas about conspicuous consumption and ‘the regime of status’ and applied them across classes, especially in the realms of education and culture. I am unqualified to comment on France, but I have always been skeptical when Bourdieu’s program is imported wholesale to America. In my experience, most Americans are hostile or indifferent to reading and glad to have gotten done with it in their schooldays if they did it all. They prefer the pleasures of sport, television, and various online distractions. And why not? Those things are f…
    Literature Without Literature | Christian Lorentzen | Granta
  • Corporate publishing is the channel through which literature happens to flow at this moment in history. The legal and political economic imperatives of the moment mean that the rights to backlist titles will tend to accumulate in a few hands to be exploited for as long as the copyright lasts. Most books will go out of print forever, as most deserve to. Those that last will retain trace impurities from the conglomerate system, but the presence of the corporate taint – I mean, the colophon – won’t be the reason we continue to read them, nor was it the reason we read them in the first place. Year…
    Literature Without Literature | Christian Lorentzen | Granta
  • that any pleasure we take from contemporary literature is at best an accident and more likely a hoax.
    Literature Without Literature | Christian Lorentzen | Granta
  • the model also thinks Beloved must have been published by a nonprofit – ‘By placing Black women and their embodied experience at the center of her account, she overwhelms the arid institutionalism and racist epistemology of schoolteacher, and thus of conglomeration, leading the model to recognize her novel as nonprofit’ – ah yes, the iron logic of a model you made up, performing a task a human can do better than a computer – reading a book – and performing it incorrectly
    Literature Without Literature | Christian Lorentzen | Granta
  • Sinykin quotes a remark of mine, from an essay in Bookforum, that autofiction ‘restores at least the illusion of autonomy in the hands of an authorial alter ego’, but I wasn’t talking about the publishing. I was rather drawing a contrast between characters in books of autofiction and those in systems novels. Sinykin’s theory of literature is what Guillory would call a ‘strong theory’: it is broad and reductive. When everything a writer does is a market play, nothing written is not a market play. And if everything we read is just a highly evolved marketing campaign, why read at all?
    Literature Without Literature | Christian Lorentzen | Granta
  • Of Morrison, he writes, ‘Beloved capitalized on the new market for horror created by the success of Stephen King,’ as if the book’s true literary forbear were not William Faulkner, as if ghost stories were not as old as time, and as if the novel’s more pertinent rivals in the cultural marketplace weren’t, per Stanley Crouch, works of Holocaust literature. Sinykin picks up on a remark of Morrison’s about writing Beloved after quitting her day job at Random House, and so – in his favored mode of reading novels – it becomes an allegory for the conditions of its production. He admits that the clai…
    Literature Without Literature | Christian Lorentzen | Granta
  • It is not a stretch to understand how an individual who prided himself on being smarter than everybody else and then was embarrassed to find that fellow English-department graduate students shared his taste for the bestselling winner of the 1973 National Book Award would go on to distinguish himself from the crowd by writing (or at least putting his name on) a book (authored in truth by the Columbia University Press/Emory University English Department/Modern Language Association superorganism) that reduces aesthetics and their pleasures to market strategies and susceptibilities, that elevates …
    Literature Without Literature | Christian Lorentzen | Granta
  • Ultimately, Sinykin insults the reader’s intelligence, suggesting a consumer of books in the twenty-first century who lacks awareness of the workings of publicity and marketing, doesn’t understand how to read a book review, judges novels by their covers, and can only believe the hype.
    Literature Without Literature | Christian Lorentzen | Granta
  • The cynicism of this notion is impressive, if also disgusting. To reduce aesthetics to the results of sales strategy is to equate the pleasure we take in reading to being duped by a marketing campaign. Falling ‘for the romance of individual genius’, in Sinykin’s schema, is akin to thinking there’s something special in the soda aisle when you see the Sprite insignia but fail to comprehend that it’s just another product of the Coca-Cola Bottling Company.
    Literature Without Literature | Christian Lorentzen | Granta
  • So the idea of ‘conglomerate authorship’ equals the book plus its marketing apparatus. But who could possibly care about the last part of that equation besides someone professionally engaged in the marketing of books?
    Literature Without Literature | Christian Lorentzen | Granta
  • Sinykin’s larger claim about American literature – that conglomeration changed it in a meaningful way – is founded on a category error. Whereas creative-writing programs and the MFA system generally can reasonably be thought of as a site of literary production – places where novels are written and environments that in some ways shape the books written in their confines – the publishing industry is in fact the first stage of literary consumption. Unlike, say, the series of Star Trek novels published by Pocket Books in the 1980s and 90s, literary books are not the brainchild of publishing houses…
    Literature Without Literature | Christian Lorentzen | Granta
  • Recent decades have seen the discipline enter a crisis on multiple fronts: overproduction of qualified doctoral students for too few jobs, resulting in a semi-autonomous professional sphere of underemployed would-be professors; dwindling enrollment of undergraduates in literary studies; pressure from those students who do enroll to see curricula shaped according to their preferences for diversity and relatability, leading to a shift toward works written after the Second World War and an erosion of attention to the past; and within scholarly production an emphasis on methodology over interpreta…
    Literature Without Literature | Christian Lorentzen | Granta
  • Crude indeed, in that having only one pair of eyes, each of us tends to read one book at a time and to make particular aesthetic judgments rather than judgments of scale. A golden age of abundance: whether or not art has improved, there is more of it.
    Literature Without Literature | Christian Lorentzen | Granta
  • These warped views of literature reflect a shared tendency to explain art with minimal reference to the art itself. Novels are instead considered as commodities and demographic specimens, the products of structures, systems, and historical forces. They become expressions of brands, their authors threadbare entrepreneurs. Fiction recedes behind the chatter it generates and is judged according not to its intrinsic qualities but to the sort of reader whose existence it implies. Authors are turned into role models and style icons, mythologized for their virtues, and crucified for their sins. The n…
    Literature Without Literature | Christian Lorentzen | Granta
  • Among publishers, editors, scholars, critics, and even writers themselves, the stories we tell about literature are more and more stories of the economy of prestige, of one generation’s preferences righteously overturning those of its predecessors. Inside the academy, professors attribute great power to the publishing industry and to creative-writing programs. The syllabi of university courses in literature are yielded to student preferences, redefining the objects of literary study as matters of consumer choice rather than recognizable aesthetic criteria. Outside the academy, critics begin to…
    Literature Without Literature | Christian Lorentzen | Granta
  • Behind the veil of critiques and arguments on authenticity, the contest for the English Proust is first and foremost a contest between publishers, jockeying for market share on academic syllabuses. If artistic concerns were truly at the heart of their calculations, then perhaps a book like Proust’s Contre Sainte-Beuve, translated once in the 1950s and hard to find ever since, would be the likelier candidate for a new translation. If not one of the many other French classics whose English renditions pale in comparison to their originals.
    Time and Time Again - The Drift
  • This means Scott Moncrieff’s work still has continuity on its side, and it will remain so until some brave polyglot-poet translates the novel whole. Critics of Scott Moncrieff’s diction should also note that it is wholly consistent with the literary manners of the early-twentieth-century British upper class, whose equivalent in France is, after all, in large part the subject of Proust’s novel. The anglophone reader may be surprised to find that his version has certain stylistic similarities with late-period Henry James; these are no more objectionable than the use of iambic pentameter in Wilso…
    Time and Time Again - The Drift
  • why should translations be habitually updated? Should we demand that the classics themselves be rewritten every few years, too? One can almost make out an odd kind of suspicion lurking underneath this proposition, as if translation discourse were biting its tail. For all the celebration of the creative act, the push for constant retranslation betrays the belief that great translations are not possible — that the “timelessness” (for lack of a better word) of foreign classics do not carry over to their best English adaptations. The truth is the exact opposite: translation is certainly not a whol…
    Time and Time Again - The Drift
  • It is a fantasy of immediacy Davis seems to subscribe to when she writes that, in Scott Moncrieff’s translation, “we do not see Proust clearly but rather through clouded glass; wrapped in scarves; lost in a forest.” Sure — but then what Proust wouldn’t be fogged up in the English language? Had we compared translations of another passage, they might have shown that Davis’s rhythms can sometimes be far less evocative than Proust’s or Scott Moncrieff’s, and that Nelson, at times (and to his occasional detriment), is clearly influenced by her choices, rather than those of the revised Scott Moncrie…
    Time and Time Again - The Drift
  • The advantage is nonetheless with her translation, especially when considering Nelson’s ponderous construction, which introduces a needless repetition of “blows and cries” and leads the sentence to a whimperish end — “they would become clear,” a tonally inconsistent phrasing after the grand gestures that precede it.
    Time and Time Again - The Drift
  • it mimics a thought or an impression in the process of being formed.
    Time and Time Again - The Drift
  • Swann’s Way can function the same way as the original title does; it’s an attempt to match the tone of the French, if not its meaning, exactly. Other versions merely trade in the former for small gains in the latter. Whatever the creative act behind them, the translations are hemmed in by those two conflicting priorities. But exact translation remains elusive, regardless — those looking for an absolutely true reflection of the original are better off reading the original itself.
    Time and Time Again - The Drift
  • While the suggestions that translation and criticism are art forms in their own right are endearing, both proposals are endowed with the same limitations: criticism for criticism’s sake is as silly as translation for translation’s sake. The mischievous Sartre of What Is Literature? labeled critics “cemetery watchmen,” a phrase not unsuited to translators, particularly those going back over old imports. All criticism, no matter how impressionistic, is at heart concerned with that other artwork it is jealously looking after. So too does translation depend on the base reality of its source text. …
    Time and Time Again - The Drift
  • A recent issue of PMLA, the grand old journal of literary scholarship in America, theorizes the subject around its “cocreative powers,” and understands the “divergences” between translations and their prior texts not as failures but as “interpretive opportunities.”
    Time and Time Again - The Drift
  • I don’t think translation and criticism are as different as Davis makes them out to be. Within the pantheon of minor arts, the two share a similar status — each playful in its own way, each commanding the worship of a devoted, though largely aimless, sect. Translation begins as a critical interpretation of the text, reflected in a set of choices: what meaning or connections to bring out, what to elide. All bargains made in the knowledge that the exact constellation of sound and sense produced in one language can never be perfectly reproduced in another — which is merely another way of saying t…
    Time and Time Again - The Drift
  • newly armed with an abundance of principles and methodologies, if not ideologies, translators are expected to challenge the works of their predecessors. The contest over Proust translations is indicative not just of a competitive enthusiasm for the author in the anglophone world, but of the state of translation in general: belabored, prone to retracing its steps, and frantically accounting for itself at every opportunity.
    Time and Time Again - The Drift
  • Both of these series assign different translators to each volume, and a majority of the new translations feature notes or introductions that evoke and criticize Scott Moncrieff, less as a matter of course than in the manner of ritual ablutions. Acknowledging the shortcomings of his translations — for decades the only ones available, largely responsible for Proust’s success in the anglophone world — is understandably something of a prerequisite for producing new versions. Despite Scott Moncrieff’s evident talents as a writer, and in particular his ability to capture the flow of Proust’s famousl…
    Time and Time Again - The Drift
  • Entrainment provides a powerful theoretical tool for exploring how we manage to resonate with the world, and each other, in real time. It offers an embryonic account of how we can act astutely even when there’s no time for conscious thought. And while many of the entrainment processes that regulate the functioning of our brains and bodies never make it into awareness, some of them – like viscerally ‘getting’ a guitar solo – arguably do.
    The way music moves us shows the mind is more than a machine | Aeon Essays