Glow.

Kurt has not-all-that-surprising news ...

[A]ll living things – including humans – could literally glow with health, until we don't.

Beware.

BostonReview asks, "To whom does the world belong?"...

AI developers will doubtless argue that they need to be able to exploit the products of their models in order to incentivize innovation; licensors will argue that they need to be financially rewarded for all their efforts in fine-tuning AI models to produce the kind of outputs they seek. Hollywood studios will ask: How can we put AI to use in generating marvelous images for the whole family to enjoy if any Tom, Dick, or Harry can “steal” the characters, plots, and graphics it generates for us? How can we devote our expertise in fine-tuning AIs to design drugs, pharmaceutical companies will crow, if we can’t recoup our investment by controlling the market with intellectual property protections? These industries are extremely skilled in influencing the legal frameworks under which they operate; their efforts to strengthen and extend their intellectual property rights have resulted in a staggering and unequivocal series of victories. How can we expect the public domain, which has no financial heft, no army of lawyers, no investors and no lobbyists, to compete with that?

Innovation lacking logic has given us front-loading washing machines, smart refrigerators, and LED lighbulbs.  Make yourself familiar with its odor and beware of its stain on intellectual property.

Seek.

Leave it to Lewis.

Think like Georgia O'Keeffe ... every single instant presents an experience worthy of learning.  Look closely.

Outstanding ...

Thanks, Kurt.

Something.

There is nothing like looking, if you want to find something. You certainly usually find something, if you look, but it is not always quite the something you were after.

J.R.R. Tolkien, from The Hobbit

Amplitude.

Every morning brings us news of the globe, and yet we are poor in noteworthy stories. This is because no event comes to us without being already shot through with explanation. In other words, by now almost nothing that happens benefits storytelling; almost everything benefits information. Actually, it is half the art of storytelling to keep a story free from explanation as one reproduces it. 

The most extraordinary things, marvelous things, are related with the greatest accuracy, but the psychological connection of the event is not forced on the reader. It is left up to him to interpret things the way he understands them, and thus the narrative achieves an amplitude that information lacks.

Walter Benjamin

Authenticity.

J.L. Bell, author of The Road to Concord: How Four Stolen Cannon Ignited the Revolutionary War, provides guidance on how to assess the authenticity of quotes made by the Founding Fathers (or any quote, for that matter).

What a wonderful website.

Revolution.

In her 2018 book, Reader, Come Home, Wolf uses cognitive neuroscience and developmental psycholinguistics to study the reading brain and literacy development, and in doing so, helps identify what is being lost. According to Wolf, we are losing what she calls "deep literacy" or "deep reading." This does not include decoding written symbols, writing one's name, or making lists. Deep literacy is what happens when a reader engages with an extended piece of writing in such a way as to anticipate an author's direction and meaning, and engages what one already knows in a dialectical process with the text. The result, with any luck, is a fusion of writer and reader, with the potential to bear original insight.

Deep literacy has wondrous effects, nurturing our capacity for abstract thought, enabling us to pose and answer difficult questions, empowering our creativity and imagination, and refining our capacity for empathy. It is also generative of successive new insight, as the brain's circuitry for reading recursively builds itself forward. It is and does all these things in part because it touches off a "revolution in the brain," meaning that it has distinctive and describable neurophysiological consequences. Understanding deep literacy as a revolution in the brain has potential payoffs for understanding aspects of history and contemporary politics alike.

Deep reading has in large part informed our development as humans, in ways both physiological and cultural. And it is what ultimately allowed Americans to become "We the People," capable of self-government. If we are losing the capacity for deep reading, we must also be prepared to lose other, perhaps even more precious parts of what deep reading has helped to build.

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Find.

Integrated.

The back-of-book index is an invention that is so integrated into our everyday reading practices as to be almost invisible. It is hard to imagine scholarly life without it, and indeed the index has its origins in the same historical moment as the arrival of the universities around the turn of the thirteenth century.

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Muse.

Is inspiration contagious? Do inspired works of art inspire the audience? There is a long tradition in the humanities that suggests it does. Plato once argued that inspiration is transmitted to the audience through the Muse. Remarkably, however, this has only just been tested scientifically.

In a recent study, Todd Thrash and colleagues conducted the first ever test of "inspiration contagion," using poetry as the vehicle. They looked at specific qualities of a text and the qualities of the reader. It's a rich study, with 36,020 interactions between all of the variables! 

Here are the essential findings ...

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Secured.

Those who cultivate letters must be supplied with the books necessary for their purpose; and until this supply is secured I shall not rest.

Aldus Manutius

How Aldus Manutius Saved Civilization ...

Interview.

Patron Misconceptions, or Why the Reference Interview is Necessary

1.  My question is stupid.

2.  The librarian does not really want to help me.

3.  I should know how to find this myself.

4.  I don't really know what I need, but the librarian will.

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Thanks, Jess!

Anticipate.

According to Wayne Potts, a zoologist who published in the journal Nature in 1984, birds in flocks are able to change direction quickly not just because they are following a leader, or their neighbors, but because they see a movement far down the line and anticipate what to do next. 

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Possible.

On a December morning, two somewhat hesitant people stood on the sidewalk of the Boulevard Haussmann, looking for a pop-up gallery we had opened for a period of six months next to the Musée Jacquemart André.

They had traveled over 800 kilometers, inquiring with different people who discouraged them and said their search seemed impossible. Perhaps the most difficult part was finding me, but thanks to their perseverance, and the kindness of a neighbor, Frédéric, the meeting happened.

The photograph they had brought to show me was small, dark and rather difficult to see. Six characters were around a table. The light was pale, perhaps it was a winter afternoon.

They told me, still hesitant, that they thought they recognized the people in it, artists in whom they had long been interested. They were collectors and liked the painters of the late 19th century, in particular the neo-impressionists. They also said it was possible that one of the figures around the table was someone whose true face had never been seen.

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More here.

Coordinate.

Here I stand before a big question mark. Here I stand like Hercules, but not at the crossroads — no, here there are a good many more roads to take and thus it is much more difficult to choose the right one. It is perhaps my misfortune that I am interested in far too much and not decisively in any one thing; my interests are not subordinated to one but instead all stand coordinate.

Søren Kierkegaard

Mystery.

In 1984, archaeologist Douglas Scott, now retired from the National Park Service, used metal detectors in a large-scale survey of the site of the 1876 Battle of Little Bighorn in eastern Montana. The conflict was a historic showdown between General George Custer’s 7th Calvary Regiment and members of the Lakota, Northern Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes, with the Native American warriors emerging victorious. An estimated 268 U.S. soldiers were killed in the conflict, including General Custer.

With help from more than 30 machine-swinging volunteers, Scott and his partner, Richard Fox, were able to locate more than 5,000 artifacts and accurately map the action of Custer’s Last Stand for the first time ever. Their work at the battleground was one of the first archaeological surveys to employ metal detectors in an organized, systematic way.

I chatted with Scott about the survey, the use of metal detectors as an archaeological tool, and the mystery of the battlefield's Deep Ravine.

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Brain-to-brain.

One day, in a few decades, when our grandchildren surf the Net just by thinking, or a mother donates her eyesight to an autistic kid who cannot see, or somebody speaks because of a brain-to-brain bypass, some of you will remember that it all started on a winter afternoon in a Brazilian soccer field with an impossible kick.

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Footsteps.

When Herman Melville was twenty-one, he embarked on the whaleship Acushnet, out of New Bedford. We all know what that led to. This past summer, Mystic Seaport finished their five-year, 7.5-million-dollar restoration of the 1841 whaleship Charles W. Morgan, the sister ship to the Acushnet. The Morgan is in many ways identical to Melville’s fictional Pequod, save that sperm whale jawbone tiller and a few other sinister touches. Mystic Seaport celebrated the completion by sailing the Morgan around New England for a couple months. I went aboard for a night and a day, intent on following in Ishmael’s footsteps, hoping to breathe a little life into my idea of the distant, literary ship. 

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Find.

For Balazs Mikusi, a young Hungarian musicologist, it was the find of a lifetime. Leafing through folders of unidentified manuscripts at the National Szechenyi Library in Budapest recently, he came across four pages of what looked to him like Mozart’s handwriting. As he read through the music, he told Agence France-Presse, he realized that he had stumbled onto Mozart’s own score of the Piano Sonata in A, K.331 – one of the best-known Mozart sonatas because of its “Rondo alla Turca” finale.

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Care.

“How works of art were looked after and protected in the past reveals how they were seen and valued,” Lowe says. “The same is true about the way we care for things now. To future generations it will reveal a lot about us – assuming we have not destroyed most of the things we inherited.”

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Factum Arte is commissioned to produce facsimiles of three paintings by Caravagio which originally are at the church of San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome.