Froggie regrets. A precious ticket to a Chicago Bulls game. A conversation about AI and nature. A profile of the worldโs most famous unknown writer. And to finish, a look back to last Friday and a St. Patrickโs Day tradition.
Anne Fadiman | Harperโs Magazine | February 10, 2023 | 5,816 words
โThere are two kinds of pets โ the ones you choose and the ones that happen to you,โ Anne Fadiman writes as she considers her familyโs various pets, a menagerie that included a goldfish, a hamster, guinea pigs, a dog named Typo, and Bunky, an African clawed frog that the family raised from a tadpole. In eulogizing Bunky, who looked โas if a regular frog had been bleached and then put in a panini press,โ Fadiman remarks on his noble species, one that helped spawn (ahem) the first widely established pregnancy test, earned a Nobel Prize for a British biologist who used an African clawed frog to clone the first vertebrate, and helped establish that reproduction can be possible in zero gravity after a trip on the space shuttleย Endeavor. All this, from a pet who was defined by not being a dog: โBunky was the anti-Typo. An unpettable pet. Cool to the touch. Squishy, but not soft. Undeniably slimy. Impervious to education. A poor hiking companion. Not much of a companion at all, really. Couldnโt be taken out of his aquarium and placed on a lap.โ Fadimanโs piece will make you laugh and make you think more carefully about your role as a pet owner. โKS
Justin Heckert | ESPN | March 7, 2023 | 5,462 words
I donโt follow the NBA, and Iโm not one for memorabilia of any variety. But leave it to Justin Heckert, one of my favorite feature writers, to make me give a damn about an old, untorn ticket to a Chicago Bulls game that happened around the time I was born. Heckert spends time with Mike Cole, who as a college freshman attended Michael Jordanโs first game with the Bulls and saved the ticket because heโs the kind of guy who does that. (Cole has a plastic bin with โMIKEโS MEMORY BOXโ written on the side, filled with ephemera from various sporting events). Nearly 40 years after the Bulls game, a span of time in which Jordan became one of the most celebrated athletes in history, a man with a Glock strapped to his hip came to Coleโs house in an armored car. He was there to retrieve the ticket, which Cole had agreed to sell at auction, where it was expected to bring in as much as $1 million. But the story Heckert tells isnโt about Cole getting rich (though that does happen). Really, itโs about the meaning we invest in objects and how it can change as we do, as the world does. โSD
Claire L. Evans | Grow | March 14, 2023 | 4,203 words
In this fascinating interview with Claire L. Evans, Ways of Being author James Bridle shares their perspective on the role of AI today โย โto broaden our idea of intelligenceโ โ and a vision for a mindful, collaborative future that ultimately decenters humans and makes more space for nonhuman beings and animals. โI donโt think there is such a thing as an artificial intelligence,โ says Bridle. โThere are multiple intelligences, many ways of doing intelligence.โ Intelligence is relational; itโs not something that exists within beings of things, but rather between them. As a gardener โ someone who loves feeling their hands in the soil, and working with the small organisms within it โ I love their conversation on gardening, and how humans can apply that same deep awareness to technology. I appreciate, too, their thoughts on resilience and the transmission of knowledge in a time of radical change on Earth. (If you enjoy this Q&A, combine it with two previous Top 5 favorites: โThe Great Forgetting,โ a read on resilience and the environment, and โWhat Counts As Seeing,โ another interview focused on the nonhuman and natural world.) โCLR
Jason Keheย |ย Wiredย |ย March 23, 2023ย |ย 4,044 words
For someone whoโs published countless books, and sold an enormous multiple of that countlessness, Brandon Sanderson is anything but a household name. Unless you live in a fantasy house, that is. Still, the most prolific living genre fiction writer has never been the subject of a magazine profile, which makes Jason Keheโs treatment all the more enjoyable. A year ago,ย I picked Keheโs piece about simulation theoryย for this roundup, and the two stories share a damn-the-torpedoes willingness to fuse exegetical acuity with a chatty, even flippant POV. What works for a philosophical essay works for a portrait; Keheโs quest isnโt to capture Sanderson as much as it is to capture why people love Sanderson so much, and what animates his sprawling fictional worlds. That means casting away the false pieties and stannery that infect so many โcelebrityโ profiles and instead relishing in the manโs banalities. Yet, the barbs are tipped with love, and everyone โ the voracious fans, Sandersonโs clichรฉ-spouting characters, and Sanderson himself โ shines as their truest selves. โPR
Harrison Scott Key | The Bitter Southerner | March 14, 2023 | 5,200 words
Last Friday night, I had two pints of Guinness and went home, content with a St. Patrickโs Day well celebrated. Apparently, I know nothing about how to observe the feast. Harrison Scott Key enlightened me in this delightful essay about the drunken debauchery that is the holidayโs annual parade in Savannah, Georgia. I loved his raucous account of trying to claim a spot for the parade: Akin to the Sacking of Constantinople, โinsults and elbows and fits [are] thrownโ until everyone settles into their position, dons a green feather boa, and makes merry. The prose is so vivid you can almost hear the noise, touch the sweaty crowds, and taste the booze. I could also feel the camaraderie โ over the years of attending the parade, Scott Key finds lasting friendships. A transplant to Savannah, and initially lonely and unable to find his place in a new community, this annual tradition helps Scott Key to discover his people. After all, as he writes, โitโs easier to love people youโve watched vomit into the hellmouth of a portable toilet at two in the morning.โ โCW
Jia Tolentino | The New Yorker | March 20, 2023 | 4,772 words
This is a fascinating look at GLP-1 drugs, which, when injected, create a sense of satiety. I appreciated Tolentinoโs exploration of the continual shift in our acceptance of different body shapes, as well as the impact of this particular trend. A piece that made me think about society, as much as weight. โCW
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In this interview with Claire L. Evans, Ways of Being author James Bridle shares thought-provoking observations about the role of artificial intelligence, the awareness of living in a more-than-human world (and what gardening can teach us about building technology), and the importance of resilience and transmittal of knowledge as the world radically changes.
But I have this very strong sense that one of the broader roles of AI in the present is really just to broaden our idea of intelligence. The very existence, even the idea of artificial intelligence, is a doorway to acknowledging multiple forms of intelligence and infinite kinds of intelligence, and therefore a really quite radical decentering of the human, which has always accompanied our ideas about AIโโโbut mostly incredibly fearfully. Thereโs always been this fear of another intelligence that will, in some way, overtake us, destroy us. Itโs where all the horror of it comes from. And that power is completely valid, if you look at human history, the human use of technology, and the way in which itโs controlled by existing forms of power. But it doesnโt need to be read that way.
โIntelligence supposes good will,โ Simone de Beauvoir wrote. โSensitivity is nothing else but the presence which is attentive to the world and to itself.โ Yet our efforts to define and measure intelligence have been pocked with insensitivity to nuance, to diversity, to the myriad possible ways of paying attention to the world. Within the human realm, there is the dark cultural history of IQ. Beyond the human realm, there is the growing abashed understanding that other forms of intelligence exist, capable of comprehending and navigating the world in ways wildly different from ours, no less successful and no less poetic. One measure of our own intelligence may be the degree of our openness to these other ways of being โ the breadth of mind and generosity of spirit with which we recognize and regard otherness.
The science-reverent English artist James Bridle invites such a broadening of mind in Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence (public library). He writes:
The tree of evolution bears many fruits and many flowers, and intelligence, rather than being found only in the highest branches, has in fact flowered everywhere.
[โฆ]
There are many ways of โdoingโ intelligence: behaviourally, neurologically, physiologically and sociallyโฆ Intelligence is not something which exists, but something one does; it is active, interpersonal and generative, and it manifests when we think and act. We have already learned โ from the gibbons, gorillas and macaques โ that intelligence is relational: it matters how and where you do it, what form your body gives it, and with whom it connects. Intelligence is not something which exists just in the head โ literally, in the case of the octopus, who does intelligence with its whole body. Intelligence is one among many ways of being in the world: it is an interface to it; it makes the world manifest.
Borrowing ecological philosopher David Abramโs notion of โthe more-than-human world,โ he adds:
Intelligence, then, is not something to be tested, but something to be recognized, in all the multiple forms that it takes. The task is to figure out how to become aware of it, to associate with it, to make it manifest. This process is itself one of entanglement, of opening ourselves to forms of communication and interaction with the totality of the more-than-human world, much deeper and more extensive than those which can be performed in the artificial constraints of the laboratory. It involves changing ourselves, and our own attitudes and behaviours, rather than altering the conditions of our non-human communicants.
[โฆ]
To think of intelligence in this way is not to reduce its definition, but to enlarge it. Anthropocentric science has argued for centuries that redefining intelligence in this way is to make it meaningless, but this is not the case. To define intelligence simply as what humans do is the narrowest way we could possibly think about it โ and it is ultimately to narrow ourselves, and lessen its possible meaning. Rather, by expanding our definition of intelligence, and the chorus of minds which manifest it, we might allow our own intelligence to flower into new forms and new emergent ways of being and relating. The admittance of general, universal, active intelligence is a necessary part of our vital re-entanglement with the more-than-human world.
A century and a half after the Victorian visionary Samuel Butler presaged the emergence of a new branch on the tree of life โ a โmechanical kingdomโ of our own making, comprising our machines governed by a โself-regulating, self-acting power which will be to them what intellect has been to the human raceโ โ Bridle offers an optimistic implication of this redefinition for the future of what we now call โartificial intelligenceโ:
If intelligence, rather than being an innate, restrictive set of behaviours, is in fact something which arises from interrelationships, from thinking and working together, there need be nothing artificial about it all. If all intelligence is ecological โ that is, entangled, relational, and of the world โ then artificial intelligence provides a very real way for us to come to terms with all the other intelligences which populate and manifest through the planet.
What if, instead of being the thing that separates us from the world and ultimately supplants us, artificial intelligence is another flowering, wholly its own invention, but one which, shepherded by us, leads us to a greater accommodation with the world? Rather than being a tool to further exploit the planet and one another, artificial intelligence is an opening to other minds, a chance to fully recognize a truth that has been hidden from us for so long. Everything is intelligent, and therefore โ along with many other reasons โ is worthy of our care and conscious attention.
Complement with Walt Whitman on the wisdom of trees, Ursula K. Le Guin on the poetry of penguins, and Marilyn Nelsonโs spare, splendid poem about octopus intelligence, then revisit Nick Cave on music, feeling, and transcendence in the age of AI.
For a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant โ a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
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