Kirkbride & Urantia

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Phantoms of the Kirkbride Hospitals

Places Journal • 8 Dec 2024 • ~14300 words

The 19th-century psychiatric facilities designed by Thomas Story Kirkbride testify to the longstanding neglect of mental health care in the United States.

It is useful to consider hauntology as a critical method for exploring alternate histories and what might have been. In Merlin Coverley’s words, “we may be haunted both by a past that refuses to be laid to rest and the promise of a future that refuses to be extinguished.” Distinct from terms such as *retro* and *nostalgia*, which reflect an obsessive consumption of the past, hauntology points to the present and future, enabling us to engage with specters that may be difficult to face, personally and culturally. Kirkbride hospitals — “insane asylums,” in general — have entered the popular imagination as haunted places, decrepit buildings that loom on the edge of town and radiate spooky energy. Some people are afraid of them, or of the patients who would inhabit them today. This haunting may start with painful memories of personal or family experiences with mental illness that may have been deeply stigmatizing.

To Whom Does the World Belong?

Boston Review • 11 Dec 2024 • ~6800 words

Alexander Hartley writes about copyrights in the AI age and who owns AI's outputs. This leads to an unlikely source of case law: a copyright claim for The Urantia Book, claimed to have been written by celestial beings.

Your opinion on the input problem may come down to your view of the true nature of LLMs. Critics of generative AI tend to view its way of answering questions as only an elaborate cut-and-paste job performed on material written by humans—incapable even of showing genuine understanding of what it says, let alone of any Senecan transformation of what it reads. This view is forcefully articulated in the now-famous characterization of LLMs as “stochastic parrots” by Emily M. Bender, Timnit Gebru, Angelina McMillan-Major, and Margaret Mitchell. Boosters of the technology dispute this view—or counter that, if accurate, it also serves just as well to characterize the way human beings produce language. (As cartoonist Angie Wang wondered: “Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?”)

Recommended Articles

Opioids Ravaged a Kentucky Town. Then Rehab Became Its Business.

New York Times • 11 Dec 2024 • ~6250 words • Archive Link

In Louisa, an unbearable social crisis has become the main source of economic opportunity.

In eastern Kentucky, a region plagued by poverty and at the heart of the country’s opioid epidemic, the burden of addressing this treatment gap has mainly been taken up by addiction-rehab companies. Many stand more like community centers or churches than medical clinics, offering not just chemical but also spiritual and logistical services with the aim of helping people in addiction find employment and re-enter society. And in the two five-year periods between 2008 and 2017, eight of the 10 counties in America with the steepest decline in overdose mortality rates were in eastern Kentucky. The state now has more residential treatment beds per person than any other state in the country, and provisional data show that, in the 12 months ending on June 30 this year, the number of overdose deaths dropped by 20 percent over the previous 12-month period. Eastern Kentucky is one of the places where you’re most likely to die of a drug addiction but also the place where you’re most likely to receive treatment for it.

Poland’s Primeval Forest Enters the Age of Polycrisis

New Lines Magazine • 11 Dec 2024 • ~4900 words

‘Hybrid warfare’ in Bialowieza brings trash, violence and death to a fragile ecosystem.

While all of Poland may want the forest preserved, the ancient ecosystem is under pressure like never before. An extraordinary combination of external forces is now bearing down upon Bialowieza. It has entered the age of polycrisis. The forest is at the intersection of seemingly disparate crises — political, economic, geopolitical and ecological — that are feeding off each other and making the underlying problems worse. Over the last three years, it has become a staging post for thousands of people fleeing war and poverty in search of a better life in Europe. It is also host to the military garrison tasked with stopping these people. Meanwhile, its scientists are battling a predatory timber industry, and its iconic animals contend with a shrinking habitat.

How Spotify and its Genres Define Who We Are

Aesthetics for Birds • 10 Dec 2024 • ~3800 words

Spotify and its bizarre, hyper-specific genres are rewriting how we understand music. Why? And should we bother fighting back?

A few years ago, if asked what music they were a fan of, nobody would think to say that they were a hypnotist or that they’d been listening to a lot of Coastal Grandmother Slow Dance Soul. Yet, in the next few weeks, many millions of people will share their Spotify Wrapped with each other, and when they do, those of the sorts of labels they’ll be using. Spotify is singlehandedly rewriting the taxonomy of music. But why?

He was suicidal and needed help. Online predators pushed him to take his life on camera.

Washington Post • 10 Dec 2024 • ~3900 words • Archive Link

The death of a Minnesota man offers a case study into how a sadistic online group has used the messaging app Discord to find and torment vulnerable people.

Among those watching the November 2021 live stream was a 15-year-old girl in an Eastern European city who had spent much of the previous week in close contact with Hervey, urging him in private messages and voice calls to take his life on camera, The Post found. It was an effort, she later said in an interview, to impress others in a global online community that rewards cruelty. “I was getting my big break,” she recalled thinking during Hervey’s suicide. “It was a competition of who could do the worst thing. So I obviously felt very cool.”

Endless work, little money, occasional UFOs: my father’s five decades driving Brazil’s roads

The Guardian • 10 Dec 2024 • ~4000 words

As a sociologist, my career couldn’t be further from that of my father, who spent his life on the road as a truck driver. It’s only in recent years, as illness has struck, that I’ve started to truly understand him.

Words were the world my father brought with him in his truck during my childhood. They resounded by themselves – cabin, Trans-Amazonian, trailer, highway, Pororoca, Belém, homesickness – or formed part of narratives about a world that seemed impossibly large. I had to imagine them in all their colours, record them in my memory and cling on to them, because soon my father would leave and he wouldn’t be back for 40 or 50 days. Most of these stories were reconstructions of events he had witnessed or heard about on the road. Others were fantastical creations: the epic hunt for a giant bird in Amazonia, the fable of a sheep he found on the highway and took on as his cabin companion, journeys over the Bolivian border with groups of hippies in the 1970s.

How WhatsApp ate the world

Rest of World • 9 Dec 2024 • ~4150 words

WhatsApp is already the world’s most widely used messaging app. Meta wants it to be a lot more.

WhatsApp initially achieved that global dominance in large part by doing just one thing very well: enabling cheap, private, and reliable messaging on almost any phone, almost anywhere in the world. But in the decade since Meta acquired WhatsApp for an eye-watering $22 billion in 2014, the app has been transformed from a narrowly focused utilitarian tool into a sort of “everything app.” In countries like India, Brazil, Mexico, and Indonesia, WhatsApp is now also a place for scheduling doctor’s appointments and conducting real estate deals — and buying Sabharwal’s ceramic ducks. In Brazil, the beauty juggernaut L’Oréal now makes an average of 25% of its online direct-to-consumer sales on WhatsApp.

A Bionic Leg Controlled by the Brain

The New Yorker • 9 Dec 2024 • ~6350 words • Archive Link

A new kind of prosthetic limb depends on carbon fibre and computer chips—and the reëngineering of muscles, tendons, and bone.

. . . Herr’s group has been working on a new type of prosthesis—one that is controlled by the brain. Not long ago, in his clutterless, white-walled office at M.I.T., he showed me a video of a woman who had undergone a novel kind of amputation that better preserves the ability of remaining muscles to contract and stretch. The signals that the brain sends to those muscles can be communicated, by way of numerous electrodes on the skin and external wires, to microprocessors in the prosthesis. I watched as the woman, simply by thinking, smoothly flexed and pointed her carbon-fibre toes. Herr told me that, when he walks with the robotic ankle he designed, “it feels like I’m in the back seat of a car. She feels like she is the car.”

‘Maya blue’: The mystery dye recreated two centuries after it was lost

Al Jazeera • 1 Dec 2024 • ~3050 words

A ceramicist in Mexico retraces his Maya roots to recreate a long-lost pre-Hispanic pigment for the first time in more than two centuries.

Before synthetic versions of blue pigment arrived during the Industrial Revolution, the colour was exceedingly rare and often more expensive than gold in Europe. The semiprecious lapis lazuli stone originated in the mountains of Afghanistan and was only accessible to the wealthy. Yet, in the New World, blue pigment was plentiful and thrived. When the Spanish arrived in the 15th century, they exploited Maya blue, along with all the treasures they stole from Mesoamerican civilisations. The Spanish controlled the prized colourant until the late 17th to early 18th centuries when synthetic substitutes began to arrive. Common knowledge of Maya blue then disappeared until its rediscovery in the 20th century.

Debanking (and Debunking?)

Bits about Money • 7 Dec 2024 • ~23700 words

Patrick McKenzie writes about the concept of debanking, while touching on issues like how it can be used as a political tool and can lead to arbitrary financial exclusion. Why is this a topic of discussion now? Crypto.

We’re hearing about debanking because it sometimes affects socially established wealthy entrepreneurs and their companies. Some people it happened to are densely networked and also affiliated with talented communicators that have (in the parlance of our times) a platform. It is important to say from the jump that this is not the typical profile. A huge majority of all people who find their accounts involuntarily closed will have been let go for credit risk or operational cost reasons. Overdraft your account repeatedly and look unlikely to be able to pay the fee for this service? Expect to lose that account, and probably all other accounts at that institution.