London-based photographer Luisa Whitton devoted several months to documenting the efforts of scientists who are striving to create robots that are nearly indistinguishable from humans. The results are as fascinating as they are unsettling.
Whitton says that the goal of her project, titled What About the Heart?, is to “subvert the traditional formula of portraiture and allure the audience into a debate on the boundaries that determine the dichotomy of the human/not human. The photographs become documents of objects that sit between scientific tool and horrid simulacrum”
When F. Scott Fitzgerald moved to Hollywood, he took screenwriting seriously – which was a serious mistake, Richard Brody argues:
Much to his credit and much to his misfortune, he was unable to sell out. He didn’t condescend to the movies, but took them seriously—so seriously that he made the mistake of thinking that screenwriting was writing, and that it could take its place in his oeuvre, which, in turn, would mark the cinema with his original artistry. In the introduction to Fitzgerald’s screenplay for his story “Babylon Revisited,” the novelist and screenwriter Budd Schulberg (who fictionalized their relationship in the novel “The Disenchanted”) explained:
Instead of rejecting screenwriting as a necessary evil, Fitzgerald went the other way and embraced it as a new art form, even while recognizing that it was an art frequently embarrassed by the “merchants” more comfortable with mediocrity in their efforts to satisfy the widest possible audience. …
In short, Fitzgerald was undone by his screenwriting-is-writing mistake. It’s a notion that has its basis in artistic form. Look at Fitzgerald’s books: they are stylistically pellucid, following on the great realistic tradition, brushed only lightly by the wings of self-consciously interventionist, modernist formalism (as in the list of party guests in “The Great Gatsby”). By contrast, William Faulkner, who went to Hollywood in the early nineteen-thirties, had no such illusions about screenwriting—in part because his sinuous and syntactically profuse writing bore so little relation to the lens-like transparency of a screenplay’s overt storytelling.
How, then, could Fitzgerald have sold out successfully? Brody proposes an alternate history: “Had Fitzgerald only been born half a century later, he … might have made the successful transition to a television-series showrunner.”
Previous Dish on Faulkner’s Hollywood detour here.
Pointing to the animated film seen above, Psychologist Ilana Simons pays tribute to her favorite living writer, the “psychologically minded” Haruki Murakami:
Haruki Murakami’s fans tend to say he touches the otherwise-private areas in their minds. Murakami is a Japanese novelist who is a minimalist with language: He inspires grand journeys of imagination without using too many adjectives. He says he sometimes writes his novels in English—which is not his first language—to limit his vocabulary and assume an odd relationship to ordinary life.
Read Murakami’s recent New Yorker short story, “Yesterday,” here.
Adam Plunkett awards that honor to Robert Frost, “despite the aspects of his work that children can understand easily”:
His work tends not to challenge us in the ways that we have come to expect from good poetry. His famously intricate forms are often rather easy to spell out, as are his less famous allusions (Romantic poets, Emerson, Shakespeare, Dante, Virgil, Catullus, Plato, Swedenborg, Darwin). His singular achievement in meter – what he called “the sound of sense”—was such an achievement precisely because he could convey a wide range of emotions by sentence sounds alone, even when we haven’t made sense of them. He was no great student of philosophy or history or politics, and most of his abstract ideas, almost all about poetry, are right there in the Collected Prose or the poems.
The challenge, then, is the lack of challenge: that we experience the poems with more depth than we can usually comprehend. In this we are uncannily like the people in his poems walking past forests or down country roads or finding other sights that entrance them, who know that they reflexively project their desires and fears onto what they see even though they can’t help themselves. No matter how false their projections, their experience of them is as real and as intricate as that of what they see (and as that of their own theories and doubts). To read Frost is to feel his characters’ inner conflicts and to feel as conflicted as his characters, who are all too often lost in themselves. So the critic is tasked with the slippery business of tracing her patterns of feeling and thought back to the source without leaving too much of herself or, like most critics, too little.
You have until noon on Tuesday to guess it. City and/or state first, then country. Please put the location in the subject heading, along with any description within the email. If no one guesses the exact location, proximity counts. Be sure to email entries to contest@andrewsullivan.com. Winner gets a free The View From Your Window book or two free gift subscriptions to the Dish. Have at it.
Nabeelah Jaffer considers how culture comes together:
[Philosophers James O.] Young and [Conrad G.] Brunk are among the first philosophers to have begun exploring the morality of different forms of appropriation, and in The Ethics of Cultural Appropriation (2009) they deem it ‘reasonable’ to be offended at the inauthentic representation of your religious beliefs. But Young also argues that giving reasonable offence might not be morally wrong. …
Every nation – every community – has its invented rituals and symbols, which spring up to help people grasp the terms of this intangible ‘communion’ in everyday life, fading away when they no longer do the job. And then new practices that suit new ways of life rise up to fill their place. Sir Walter Scott improvised many supposedly ‘ancient’ clan tartans in the 19th century – the cloth that had once been banned as a symbol of Scottish patriotism was being reimagined as a symbol of British unity. Middle Eastern belly dancing might originally have been connected with pagan fertility rituals or with travellers from India, just as early Christmas celebrations appropriated the festival of the pagan winter solstice. Private aural confession emerged as a Christian ritual in Ireland only in the sixth century, before spreading as a sacrament to the rest of Europe. All rituals and symbols are constructed, and inherited tradition is not always the best test of cultural authenticity. Religions and cultures – and indeed nations – have survived only by being open to new ways of representing themselves. Few have scrupled about drawing inspiration from others in the process. No matter how offensive – and even destructive – cultural appropriation can be, it is almost impossible to separate every murky incident from this wider process of exchange and adaptation.
(Photo: In a full Stewart Clan Tartan Kilt, Norm Taflinger, 3rd Air Force, RAF Mildenhall, plays “Amazing Grace” on the bagpipes as part of a memorial held at RAF Lakenheath, via Flickr user Beverly & Pack)
Ever since The Innovator’s Dilemma, everyone is either disrupting or being disrupted. There are disruption consultants, disruption conferences, and disruption seminars. This fall, the University of Southern California is opening a new program: “The degree is in disruption,” the university announced. “Disrupt or be disrupted,” the venture capitalist Josh Linkner warns in a new book, The Road to Reinvention, in which he argues that “fickle consumer trends, friction-free markets, and political unrest,” along with “dizzying speed, exponential complexity, and mind-numbing technology advances,” mean that the time has come to panic as you’ve never panicked before. …
Most big ideas have loud critics. Not disruption. Disruptive innovation as the explanation for how change happens has been subject to little serious criticism, partly because it’s headlong, while critical inquiry is unhurried; partly because disrupters ridicule doubters by charging them with fogyism, as if to criticize a theory of change were identical to decrying change; and partly because, in its modern usage, innovation is the idea of progress jammed into a criticism-proof jack-in-the-box.
It’s not just an overused buzzword, she argues. In fact, the influential concept of “disruptive innovation” is probably bunk:
Disruptive innovation as a theory of change is meant to serve both as a chronicle of the past (this has happened) and as a model for the future (it will keep happening). The strength of a prediction made from a model depends on the quality of the historical evidence and on the reliability of the methods used to gather and interpret it. Historical analysis proceeds from certain conditions regarding proof. None of these conditions have been met. … The handpicked case study, which is [Innovator’s Dilemma author Clayton] Christensen’s method, is a notoriously weak foundation on which to build a theory.
[T]he term “disruption” has often come hand in hand with a certain amount of hucksterism. People who have no connection to Christensen, many of whom don’t seem to even understand his theory, have declared everyone and everything to be disruptive. The problem has become so bad that that many intelligent people have begun writing it off as a meaningless buzzword. Yet Lepore’s nitpicking aside, Christensen’s theory has a lot of explanatory power. It’s impossible to talk about what’s happening to companies as diverse as Kodak, Microsoft, and the New York Times without the vocabulary and concepts Christensen developed. And while understanding the theory won’t solve all the problems these companies face, it will certainly allow them to make more thoughtful decisions than if they follow Lepore’s advice and write it off altogether.
Lepore’s piece largely succeeds in skewering the zaniest of the “disruptive innovation” zealots and highlighting the fallibility of their prophet and holy text. And her revisionist reading of Christensen’s book adds some important caveats to his model. Importantly, the “disruptors” don’t always win in the end, and in some cases established businesses might harm themselves more by overreacting than underreacting. It would also be a great service if Lepore’s story had the effect of making people stop and think before they throw around “disrupt” as a buzzword. That said, Lepore’s cherry-picked counterexamples don’t definitively overthrow Christensen’s theory any more than his own cherry-picked examples definitively prove it.
Drake Bennett wonders, “If the evidence is, in fact, more ambiguous, why have Christensen’s ideas proven so broadly popular?”
Some part of it is clearly the rise of the Internet. In the age of Uber and Craigslist, the idea certainly feels true (particularly to those, like journalists, whose business is feeling disrupted at the moment). … Part of it, too, I’d argue, is that Christensen’s description of how the world works matches how Silicon Valley sees itself, and Silicon Valley has gotten a lot more culturally important. The disruption narrative is one in which the upstarts are the heroes. Their eventual victory over the established order is foreordained, and they are the force that moves society – or at least technology – forward, disruption by disruption. Starting a company holds the potential to be not only lucrative, but also revolutionary.
At the same time, Kevin Roose resents the way some use the term as an “all-purpose rhetorical bludgeon [to] distract us from the real issues with emergent products and companies”:
Frequently, when start-ups working in heavily regulated industries encounter resistance from lawmakers or industry overseers, the concept of disruption is invoked almost instinctively. “But we’re disruptive!” the start-up pleads. “How can you be against disruption?” The problem with this reaction is that it lumps all opposition to new technology into the same category – anti-progress Luddites protecting the status quo at the expense of innovation. In reality, motives differ widely. Maybe a flashy new biotech start-up is being opposed becuse regulators are in the pocket of Big Pharma. Or maybe the FDA is holding it up because the founder is a charlatan selling fake stem-cell treatments to children. When every new innovation is cast as disruptive, there’s no way to distinguish between legitimate opposition and mere protectionism.
Critics contend that reverse osmosis desalination requires large amounts of energy. But so do our home refrigerators, air conditioners, and washing machines. The real issue is the cost of water desalination relative to other available sources. For example, bottled water costs range from $1 to $3 per liter in the U.S., depending on the brand and location of purchase. In comparison, seawater desalination costs can be as high as about $0.45 per 100 liters and about $1.50-$2.00 per 1,000 liters for large-scale production. Of course, the above cost does not include conveyance of the water to the customer.
Over the years, intensive research and development efforts have been devoted to lowering the energy cost of reverse osmosis seawater desalination with tremendous success. Since about 1990, energy costs have decreased by nearly 75 percent for large-capacity plants.
While it’s not quite correct that every glass of water contains dinosaur pee, it is true that every source of fresh water on Earth (rainfall, lakes, rivers, and aquifers) is part of a planetary-scale water cycle that passes through every living thing at one point or another. In a very real way, each and every day we are already drinking one another’s urine. …
Barring a miracle, desalination is among the least desirable options. There are significant economic, environmental, energy, and political barriers. Desalination is the Alberta tar sands of water resources. When you look closely at the choices, it’s clear the future of Western water supplies is toilet water.
The English poet Ted Hughes presented a series of BBC programs in the 1960s addressed primarily to children to help them feel at home with writing poetry. “In these talks,” he wrote, “I assume that the latent talent for self-expression in any child is immeasurable.” These were later anthologized in a book very much worth looking for titled Poetry in the Making: An Anthology of Poems and Programmes from ‘Listening and Writing’. In it, he outlines all sorts of valuable poetic exercises and comments on poems that illustrate his points. From the chapter, “Writing about People”:
From time to time I have read a good deal about Sir Francis Bacon, the great Elizabethan statesman and philosopher. . . . I read a lot about him while just searching for the clue that would tell me what he was really like. At last I found it. I read that he had peculiar eyes—eyes, we are told, like a viper…. At once I was able to feel I knew exactly what that man was like. I felt to be in his presence. And everything that I could remember about him became at once near and real. And this is what we want.
Elizabeth Bishop felt that her poem “Sandpiper” (1962) was an accurate self-portrait. Accuracy was one of the three qualities she admired, she said, “in the poetry I like best.” (The others were spontaneity and mystery.) Reading this poem I always feel her presence “at once near and real,” yielding a strong sense of what she was “really like.”
“Sandpiper” by Elizabeth Bishop:
The roaring alongside he takes for granted
and that every so often the world is bound to shake.
He runs, he runs to the south, finical, awkward,
in a state of controlled panic, a student of Blake.
The beach hisses like fat. On his left, a sheet
of interrupting water comes and goes
and glazes his dark and brittle feet.
He runs, he runs straight through it, watching his toes.
–Watching, rather, the spaces of sand between them,
where (no detail too small) the Atlantic drains
rapidly backwards and downwards. As he runs,
he stares at the dragging grains.
The world is a mist. And then the world is
minute and vast and clear. The tide
is higher or lower. He couldn’t tell you which.
His beak is focused; he is preoccupied,
looking for something, something, something.
Poor bird, he is obsessed!
The millions of grains are black, white, tan and gray,
mixed with quartz grains, rose and amethyst.
The Dish 