Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

Dream old pay phone ringing in hospital I pick up
receiver        voice says “The answer is awe.”
Still don’t know what to do with it last September right
before I was diagnosed        and the dream is still irritating

— Alice Notley / “The Answer Is Awe”

No relief… This morning the floor of the shower appeared somehow both lower than it felt to be in standing on it, and higher than it appeared in my perception, as if I were trapped in two phases of myself standing in the same place, some crux of touching eras. I found myself thinking again about suicide.

— Blake Butler / Molly

Salam to Gaza
The refugee camp lacks bread now
But it is enriched with blood
The camp lacks land and bread
But now it ascends to the skies

— Hussein Barghouthi / “Salaam to Gaza”

Chomsky has been relentless in reminding society that power takes many forms and that the production of ignorance is not merely about the crisis of test scores or a natural state of affairs, but about how ignorance is often produced in the service of power. According to Chomsky, ignorance is a pedagogical formation that is used to stifle thinking and promotes a form of anti-politics, which undermines matters of judgment and thoughtfulness central to politics. At the same time, it is a crucial factor not just in producing consent but also in squelching dissent. For Chomsky, ignorance is a political weapon that benefits the powerful, not a general condition rooted in some inexplicable human condition.

— Henry A. Giroux / “Introduction” / Because We Say So

The world found nothing sacred in the abstract nakedness of being human.

— Hannah Arendt / The Origins of Totalitarianism

Artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots are more persuasive in online debates than people are — especially when they’re able to personalize their arguments using information about their opponent. Researchers pitted 900 people in the United States against either another person or OpenAI’s GPT-4 for 10-minute online debates on a sociopolitical issue. When neither the human nor AI had access to their opponent’s background information, GPT-4 was about as persuasive as a human. But if the basic demographic information from an initial survey was given to opponents before the debate, GPT-4 out-argued humans 64% of the time.

— Chris Simms  / “AI uses people’s info to persuade them” / Nature

… life’s gone by … like I never lived…

— Anton Chekhov (Stephen Karam adaptation) / The Cherry Orchard

What I’m Listening To: 

If you go down to Hammond
You’ll never come back
In my opinion you’re
On the wrong track

— The Roches / “Hammond Song”