The modern world turns out to rely greatly on unprotected bits of equipment in remote places. "We are talking about thousands and thousands of kilometers of infrastructure between Europe and the United States and Asia," says Katarzyna Zysk, a professor of international relations and contemporary history at the Norwegian Institute for Defence Studies in Oslo. "This is a network that is extremely hard to surveil, to monitor and to protect. This is infrastructure that is highly vulnerable to sabotage." from A Subsea Cable Went Missing. Was Russia to Blame? [Bloomberg; ungated]       

Undersea shenanigans, Previously

The Best New TV Show Is Somehow This Chevy Dealer's Surprisingly Good Parody Of 'The Office'

Swear words and profanities from around the world. [CW: swear words and profanities from around the world]

100 of the Greatest Posters of Celebrities Urging You to Read [LitHub]

Consumers often find broken Oreo cookies to be a disappointment, viewing them as imperfect and less enjoyable. However, the philosophy of Kintsugi teaches that there is beauty in imperfections and that items can become more valuable when repaired thoughtfully. from Oreo — Kintsugi By Leo Burnett Tailor Made, São Paulo [CW: advertising, ad agency preening]

Moreo: Oreo x Game of Thrones Title Sequence Previously: Kintsugi, Oreology, Ⓞ Ⓡ Ⓔ Ⓞ, a series of small starchy tubes, and Oreo by Fran Ross

Making Hitler funny may be a break with the reverence Hitler demanded at gunpoint. But it also ends up being a way to give Hitler back his aesthetics and part of his glamor. When Downfall Hitler launches into an attack on road construction, it's incongruous and absurd. But it's also Hitler getting you to cheer along as he attacks the incompetence and inconvenience of a sclerotic democratic bureaucracy—and attacking sclerotic democratic bureaucracy is a thing that the real Hitler actually did. A dollop of humor makes the anti-establishment rage go down easy, not least because it distracts you from the fact that the "establishment" in question is just anyone the fascists decide to target. As the political scientist Jonathan Bernstein explains, "drain the swamp" is a successful slogan precisely because it's a catchier way to say "liquidate our enemies." from Fascists Know How to Turn Mockery Into Power [Foreign Policy, from 2020; ungated]

One wonders if he could picture our current moment, when desire and expression are so ready-made, so undemanding and yet so effortlessly able to mollify and monopolize our attention. Open your streaming services—film, TV, music. The choices are overwhelming. Funny, then, that so much of it looks and feels the same, that every artist and writer and musician can tell of unproduced passion projects, that dissenting voices are so easily drowned out. Quantity drowns quality. That which exists is good; that which is good exists. What doesn't exist is a challenge to this state of affairs. from The Last Avant-Garde [Alexander Billet reviews Dominique Routhier's "With and Against: The Situationist International in the Age of Automation." in the L.A. Review of Books; ungated]

Current interventions to combat misinformation, including fact-checking, media literacy tips and media coverage of misinformation, may have unintended consequences for democracy. We propose that these interventions may increase scepticism towards all information, including accurate information. ... Accordingly, this project addresses an overarching question of theoretical and practical importance: how can we improve interventions against misinformation to minimize their negative spillover effects? from Prominent misinformation interventions reduce misperceptions but increase scepticism [Nature]

Related: A Bugatti car, a first lady and the fake stories aimed at Americans

POET AS CYBORG PORNSTAR is one of Seven Poems by Hasti [The White Review]

Sci-fi is an amazing genre. It helps us explore our feelings about the unknown, the future, and the possible. It lets us imagine "what if" scenarios, and then build out rich worlds that our minds can occupy. It depicts dystopias we should fend off and utopias we should seek – and it teases us with the scintillating possibility that humans may actually be able to build the world we want. But over the last few generations, it's been harder for us to imagine this better world – and our sci-fi reflects that. from who killed the world? [The Pudding]

As consumers in general, we've gotten very good at completely disregarding things that don't offer us anything worthwhile, even when they want to be noticed. "Banner blindness" is a particularly acute form of this adaptation to capitalism. Our almost subconscious filtering of our perception to things that seem worth the intellectual effort allows a lot of ubiquitous features of products to fly under the radar. Buttons that we just never press, because sometime a decade ago we got the impression they were useless. from the contemporary carphone by j.b. crawford [computers are bad]

Did Sontag and Steiner get along? Don't be silly. Like two positively charged particles, they were kept apart by powerful forces of repulsion. They 'disliked and mistrusted one another,' Boyers says; 'the loathing they came to have for each other clearly had much to do with the sense that there was room on the current scene for only one such person.' It seems hardly worth saying that Sontag and Steiner were alike not just as critics but as psychological case studies. Two False Selves, two mosaic-builders, busily building. If there is one true thing about a False Self, it's that it loathes and despises other False Selves, perceiving in them, of course, the falseness that it can perceive in itself only at the cost of its existence. from The Devouring Mind by Kevin Power [Dublin Review of Books; ungated]

An essay around a review of Maestros & Monsters: Days & Nights with Susan Sontag & George Steiner, by Robert Boyers

"Does this country have any heroes?" Gatalo asked. "We do not," came the reply. A minute later there was another answer. They did have a hero. His name was Bruce Lee. from The Wild True Story of the Bruce Lee Statue Heist [DailyBeast]

Where are all the sad young men in literature, then? The male equivalent of My Year of Rest and Relaxation's droll narrator? The modern-day Holden Caulfields? As far as the Internet is largely concerned, there aren't any. Or at least very few of them receive the same hype as books by and about women. Perhaps it's because there's a certain stigma surrounding male vulnerability, but in contemporary fiction, the subject is wildly overlooked. This discrepancy isn't just a matter of representation, though: It's reflective of wider attitudes toward masculinity. If social norms dictate that men should embody strength and stoicism, there's little space left for those who don't. Ultimately, fiction plays a crucial role in shaping our self-image and reality; it's why the relative absence of young men in recent fiction profoundly affects how we perceive and understand the emotional lives of men more broadly. from Where Is All the Sad Boy Literature? by Katie Tobin [Esquire; ungated]

Fog fills spaces, like water or darkness. Like grief. I am in Souris, a fishing town of a few hundred on the northeastern edge of Prince Edward Island. In my left hand is a paper cup of lukewarm coffee. In my right is a brown bag with a breakfast I no longer want. The paper is stamped with the bright phrase, "bonne journée!" Have a good day! I'm not having a good day. The tire Nick had cautioned me about is the least of my concerns. My motorcycle won't start. from'I'm Not Sure What I'm Doing Here' by Emily Zebel [Longreads]

This paper shows that shootings are predictable enough to be preventable. Using arrest and victimization records for almost 644,000 people from the Chicago Police Department, we train a machine learning model to predict the risk of being shot in the next 18 months. Out-of-sample accuracy is strikingly high: of the 500 people with the highest predicted risk, almost 13 percent are shot within 18 months, a rate 128 times higher than the average Chicagoan. A central concern is that algorithms may "bake in" bias found in police data, overestimating risk for people likelier to interact with police conditional on their behavior. We show that Black male victims more often have enough police contact to generate predictions. But those predictions are not, on average, inflated; the demographic composition of predicted and actual shooting victims is almost identical. There are legal, ethical, and practical barriers to using these predictions to target law enforcement. But using them to target social services could have enormous preventive benefits: predictive accuracy among the top 500 people justifies spending up to $134,400 per person for an intervention that could cut the probability of being shot by half. from Machine Learning Can Predict Shooting Victimization Well Enough to Help Prevent It [NBER; direct link to working paper (PDF)]

'Who are you to tell me what to believe?' replies the zealot. It is a misguided challenge: it implies that certifying one's beliefs is a matter of someone's authority. It ignores the role of reality. Believing has what philosophers call a 'mind-to-world direction of fit'. Our beliefs are intended to reflect the real world – and it is on this point that beliefs can go haywire. There are irresponsible beliefs; more precisely, there are beliefs that are acquired and retained in an irresponsible way. One might disregard evidence; accept gossip, rumour, or testimony from dubious sources; ignore incoherence with one's other beliefs; embrace wishful thinking; or display a predilection for conspiracy theories. from You don't have a right to believe whatever you want to [Aeon; ungated]

You cannot walk on water or raise the dead. But you can do something that Jesus never did: eat a banana. Or a tomato. Or a potato. Just walk into any supermarket on the planet to get either of those, or any of the other once-regional crops that have gone global since Golgotha. This map shows the various regions of origin for 151 of today's staple food crops. It illustrates an astounding fact that has become so commonplace that we hardly ever give it a thought: just how "foreign" much of the food on our plates actually is. from Why Jesus Never Ate a Banana [Atlas Obscura]

Technically, the returns will diminish because of the nature of LMs: they will return shallow text probabilistically biased toward any religious text in their training corpus. Spiritually, while LMs may marshal text effectively, they can neither "read, mark, learn," nor "inwardly digest" it. Meditating on divine words is what human beings do in their inner being. This technically cannot and morally should not be automated. Mary could not have outsourced her pondering of the angel's words to an LM, not only because an LM's next-item-prediction objective is not pondering, but also because it would have denied those words' ability to form her. from ChatGPT Goes to Church [Plough]

Note: content is focused on Christianity, Plough is the publishing house of something called the Bruderhof. YMMV

"At the end of every session it feels like there has been a weight that has been lifted from both of us," Melamed continues. "It can be a very emotional experience. I love it. I feel fortunate that I am able to draw people out in this way and every time, I am able to learn something more and discover something more about myself. The healing always goes both ways." from The exquisite joy of finding comfort in your skin [huck]

"I wanted to start an all-women punk rock band. My definition of punk rock is do-it-yourself, who cares if it's sloppy or unprofessional. My definition of punk has little or nothing to do with politics or shaved heads and everything to do with what's new and not in the mainstream. It's about going on stage as you, full of rage, heartbreak and laughs. It's about making the music you hear in your head and heart." from Rocker, writer and teacher: Remembering Laurie Lindeen of Zuzu's Petals [MPR News]

Minneapolis musician-turned-writer Laurie Lindeen of Zuzu's Petals dies at 62 [Star Tribune] Laurie Lindeen Dies: Zuzu's Petals Singer-Songwriter & Author Was 62 [Deadline] '90s Rockstar Dies of Brain Aneurysm: Laurie Lindeen Was 62 [PopCulture] An Interview With Laurie Lindeen [Chicagoist, 2009] it's the drummer that matters [The Smart Set, 2017] Zuzu's Petals [Twin Tone Records] Laurie Lindeen Zuzu's Petals - It's a Wonderful Life! (1946)

In these novels, when white women's sexual practices contravene bourgeois ideals, the characters are often re-racialized, described as non-white. So if Russia-themed erotica tends to be about sexual slavery and sexual freedom, then — as in the construction of race itself — it's always in reference to others: other white women, middle eastern women, Black women. As a novel in this messy canon, Ariane is about all of these figures, about the history of racialization across the globe. Erotica is world history written onto the two hemispheres of a woman's butt. from Ice queens, sex machines by Fiona Bell [The European Review of Books; ungated] [NSFW text]

"You must not talk about the future. The future is a con. The tarot is a language that talks about the present. If you use it to see the future, you become a conman," says Alejandro Jodorowsky, maker of cult films El Topo, The Holy Mountain, Santa Sangre, and the unmade psychedelic Dune; writer of the legendary graphic novel series The Incal; and practitioner of the tarot. from Untold Fortunes: A Reading List on the Creative Uses of the Tarot [Longreads]

Your card is ... The Previously

These new pricing intermediaries are similar to ATPCO, but don't just act as information exchanges between competitors. They actually set the prices for an entire industry by using machine-learning algorithms and artificial intelligence, which are programmed to maximize profits. To arrive at optimal prices, these software applications aggregate vast amounts of relevant market data, some of which is public and much of which is competitively sensitive information given to them by their clients. Each algorithmic scheme has its own distinct features, but they all share the same underlying philosophy: Competing on price in an open market is a race to the bottom, so why not instead coordinate together to grow industry's profits? from Three Algorithms in a Room [The American Prospect; ungated]