From High Country News:

If you drive west from Bozeman and veer off the interstate a few miles after Echo Lake, turning down a mostly gravel road still lovingly called Highway 38, you see them everywhere: Fences. At every turn, almost every inch of the way until you hit the national forest, they lurk. Some wrapped with tightly wound barbed wire, others just a few posts leaning on each other like a pair of drunken uncles. Everywhere you look, they straggle, weathered enough to deceive you into believing they’ve been there as long as the majestic streams and fields and mountains they serve to keep you from.

. . . .

I followed them all the way to Missoula, to the James Welch Native Literary Festival in late July. The first Native literary festival organized by Native writers themselves, it aimed to gather the premier and promising writers of Indian Country without the masturbatory performances of white guilt or capital-r Representation that ooze from similar industry-sponsored events. The festival was the brainchild of Sterling HolyWhiteMountain, a Blackfeet writer who loves to remind you that he is Blackfeet and that you are standing on his land. In this case, it’s actually Salish land, though in the span of the four-day fest, it also, kind of, felt like Sterling’s land, too. On the second day, we met on the third floor of the Missoula Public Library. As we spoke, writers floated past the couches we’d secured. Speculative-fiction writer Rebecca Roanhorse stopped by; poet and storyteller Taté Walker and I discussed journalism; essayist Chris La Tray marveled that he and Sterling both had the same limited-release Timex watch. And threaded throughout all of this was something resembling an interview with Sterling.

If you knocked back a shot every time he used the word “profound,” you’d be drunk by the time his first thought ended. Still, you’d stay on the edge of your seat until he finished. I asked Sterling why he picked Missoula for the inaugural fest. “When art ends up on a reservation, it dies,” he replied. “Art needs to be in conversation with other art, all the time. … Everybody just thinks like somehow we’re only in conversation with other Native art. And that’s not true at all.”

To be clear, neither the rez nor the Indian is the problem here. The problem is that most non-Indians would rather plop us into a category than sustain a conversation with our art. If you’ll allow me the metaphor, the term “Native Lit” is just another fence, one that the publishing and media industries use to separate us from other horror writers and sci-fi writers and poets and modernists. In order to pay the rent and carry on our craft, we must perform behind the barrier.

Link to the rest at High Country News

From Phys.org:

Using artificial intelligence, physicists have compressed a daunting quantum problem that until now required 100,000 equations into a bite-size task of as few as four equations—all without sacrificing accuracy. The work, published in the September 23 issue of Physical Review Letters, could revolutionize how scientists investigate systems containing many interacting electrons. Moreover, if scalable to other problems, the approach could potentially aid in the design of materials with sought-after properties such as superconductivity or utility for clean energy generation.

“We start with this huge object of all these coupled-together differential equations; then we’re using machine learning to turn it into something so small you can count it on your fingers,” says study lead author Domenico Di Sante, a visiting research fellow at the Flatiron Institute’s Center for Computational Quantum Physics (CCQ) in New York City and an assistant professor at the University of Bologna in Italy.

The formidable problem concerns how electrons behave as they move on a gridlike lattice. When two electrons occupy the same lattice site, they interact. This setup, known as the Hubbard model, is an idealization of several important classes of materials and enables scientists to learn how electron behavior gives rise to sought-after phases of matter, such as superconductivity, in which electrons flow through a material without resistance. The model also serves as a testing ground for new methods before they’re unleashed on more complex quantum systems.

Link to the rest at Phys.org

PG notes that this is the first quantum physics post he remembers making. He doesn’t think he was in two places at once when he decided to post this item.

The only people for me are the mad ones: the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who… burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow Roman candles.

Jack Kerouac

From The Paris Review:

In the early seventies, Helen Garner, a newly single mother, found herself in the first of several “hippie houses” she lived in that decade in the suburbs of Melbourne. She read and made up songs with her daughter and fell in love with a heroin addict—an affair she documented daily in her diary. The writing deepened as her life became more complicated. Soon, she began to see an outline. “Story is a chunk of life with a bend in it,” Garner told Thessaly La Force in her Art of Fiction interview, published in the Fall issue of the Review, “and I could feel this one coming.” Every day for a year, after she had dropped her daughter off at school, she sat in the state library working on her first novel, Monkey Grip.

The book was a hit, although several critics (“almost always men”) accused Garner of simply publishing her personal journals. The truth is, she confesses, the novel really was closely based on her diary—and why not? “Underlying the famously big gap between fiction and nonfiction there’s a rather naïve belief that fiction is invented—­that it’s pulled out of thin air,” Garner says. “All those comments I’ve had to cop about my novels not being novels—­they rest on that idea that the novel is mightier than every other form.” When we asked Garner—­who is also an accomplished journalist who has covered criminal trials for decades—­whether she might share with us something from her recent journals, she sent us a true “chunk of life,” at once artfully sculpted and uncompromisingly honest.

. . . .

In the winter of 2017, when I wrote these entries, three things were dawning on me: first, that if my hearing continued to fade I would have to stop writing about criminal trials; second, that although I was probably burned-out, I would miss the courts terribly; and third, that I would be saved from boredom and despair by the company of my young grandchildren, who live next door.

*

Took the 17-year-old to the city to buy a pair of Doc Martens for her birthday. We walked past the Supreme Court. “Nanna, is this where you go to those trials?” “Yes. That big brown building.” “Can we go in and have a look?” At the door of the first courtroom we come to, a murder trial is rolling. I show her how to bow and we creep into the media seats. Young guy in the dock, pale, rigid, in a dark blue suit. The witness on the stand is giving a graphic account of what happens inside a skull when a head is smashed against a concrete curb. Oh God. I glance up at the judge. I know her. What will she think of me, bringing a schoolgirl in here? The girl is very still, straight-backed, bright-faced, watching and listening. I sit there gritting my teeth. Court rises and I hustle her on to the street. “Are you okay? Are you upset? Was it too much?” She wakes from a reverie. “No. I’m fine. It wasn’t upsetting. Because it was scientific.”

*

In the post office throwaway bin I find a CD of Glen Campbell’s Greatest Hits. Secretly in the car I play over and over Jimmy Webb’s three works of genius: “Wichita Lineman,” “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” and “Galveston.” On the freeway my ten-year-old grandson digs out the Campbell from the mess in the glove box: “Who’s this?” I flinch, but he puts it on, and soon we’re singing along, him in his breaking voice, me in my old woman’s one which has dropped to a tenor. He loves all the songs, even the revolting ones like “Dreams of the Everyday Housewife.”

*

Court 4, pale pink with high, looped plaster garlands that glistened like ivory. The sentencing of the African refugee who’d killed three of her children. The judge read out the sentence. I was straining to hear, fighting my hearing loss and the muffled acoustic of the courtroom. Her husband was shot dead in front of her? They burned his body? They raped her? She began to weep and couldn’t stop. Her two robed lawyers approached the huge old timber dock, they had to reach up and hook their fingers at shoulder level over its high edge, I saw their pale hands grip the rim, like kids at a lolly-shop counter. She got 26 years, 20 before she can apply for parole. Even the tough-looking woman security guard was wiping her eyes. Walked away, walked and walked through the city, crying and raving to myself, bought a pair of black trousers and a T-shirt, went up the stairs to Gopal’s and ate a bowl of carrot and beetroot salad for $4. I’ll be dead by the time she gets out. What will she do, in prison, each day for 20 years? What will become of her other kids? It seemed the first time I’d ever seriously asked myself: Why do we put people in jail?

Link to the rest at The Paris Review

From Hugh Stephens Blog:

As Bill C-18 continues its deliberate journey down the Canadian Parliamentary legislative track on its way toward enactment, the Bill’s prime targets (Alphabet, in the form of Google Search and Meta in the form of Facebook) continue to deploy the full force of their lobbying efforts to derail the legislation. Their most recent effort is a White Paper released earlier this month by Washington DC-based tech industry lobby group, the Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA). In a valiant but scarcely credible effort the CCIA attempts to argue that if enacted, C-18 would violate Canada’s international trade obligations, specifically commitments it made in the recently updated NAFTA accord (USCMA/CUSMA) and those required by virtue of its membership in the international copyright treaty, the Berne Convention.

In the process, the paper rolls out a number of other arguments against the legislation, such as claiming that it will benefit only a “select few large and powerful media companies” and will “do little or nothing to support sustainable or quality journalism in Canada”, while claiming that it will promote disinformation and content from untrusted third parties. The paper’s authors even claim that any payment from the digital intermediaries, who have scooped up the lion’s share of ad revenues (largely through leveraging content produced by others, usually without any payment), will “jeopardize the long-term viability of the (media) sector”. How will this happen? I guess it is supposed to make them fat and lazy. I will give the authors an “A” for creativity in terms of the range of objections they manage to roll out, but an “F” for making a convincing argument.

What readers should know is that the legislation is currently targeted primarily at two major US-based internet platforms, “digital news intermediaries” in the words of the legislation, just as Australia’s recent legislation to enact a News Media Bargaining Code aimed at the same two companies (Google and Facebook). However, they are not named in the Bill which, if passed, will apply to a;

“…digital news intermediary if, having regard to the following factors, there is a significant bargaining power imbalance between its operator and news businesses: (a) the size of the intermediary or the operator; (b) whether the market for the intermediary gives the operator a strategic advantage over news businesses; and (c) whether the intermediary occupies a prominent market position.”

Intermediaries have to self-designate, and the definition is generic, but it is clear who we are talking about. The CCIA paper goes to great lengths to quote Canadian politicians to show that Google and Facebook are the main targets although there are also references to “GAFAM”. (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft). If the shoe fits, wear it. No one has ever denied where the problem lies. And yes, they happen to be all US companies—for the moment.

The CCIA paper argues that if Alphabet and Meta are the only companies captured by the legislation, this amounts to a denial of national treatment (treating entities of your trading partners in an equivalent manner to domestic entities) and would be a USMCA/CUSMA treaty violation. But is this true? Hardly. Unless a measure is proven to be a disguised barrier to trade, as long as it applies to all companies, domestic or foreign, it will be difficult to substantiate a national treatment violation even if at the moment it affects only certain companies because of their size, market dominance or some other reason. Just because the affected companies happen to be headquartered in the US, it does not follow that this is an action targeted exclusively at US or foreign companies. For example, given the growing use of its platform for news distribution, it is possible that a platform like TikTok could fall within the ambit of the legislation.

C-18 is no more a violation of the national treatment principle than the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), which targets the anti-competitive behaviour of “internet gatekeepers”, who happen to be prominently represented among the GAFAM US-based companies. 

. . . .

Just as the Bill contains a definition for digital intermediaries that are subject to the legislation, so too it defines an “eligible news business”. An eligible business, one that can enter bargaining with the platforms for compensation for use of Canadian news content, is any entity producing news content that receives the journalism tax credit or which has a minimum of two journalists in Canada and operates and edits material in Canada. That hardly limits the benefit to “large and powerful media companies”. The CCIA paper goes on to argue that the definition of an eligible news business will make it difficult for Canada to avoid a charge of unjustified discrimination against US media organizations. This argument must truly be galling to US news producers, none of whom belong to the CCIA and most of whom are engaged in trying to bring about the same legislation in the US as Canada is proposing.

Link to the rest at Hugh Stephens Blog and thanks to C. for the tip.

PG is certain that Canadians are regularly and justifiably aggravated by their southern neighbor, its businesses and citizens.

However, the internet and information flowing on it are not the easiest things to legislate. This is by design. As PG has mentioned before, one of the fundamental characteristics of the internet’s structure is that it’s pretty much impossible to prevent information from flowing wherever consumers want to use it.

For instance, without moving from his keyboard at Casa PG, PG can log onto the internet from a whole bunch of locations from Albania to Vietnam using a VPN (Virtual Private Network) service, of which there are many.

China has spent a large amount of money and effort to create what is generically called, “The Great Firewall of China,” to prevent internet access to non-Chinese websites, but there are reportedly several ways of circumventing the Great Firewall for those who really want to do so. PG won’t speculate about how dangerous such circumvention may or may not be.

From The Economist:

According to a remark attributed to Voltaire, in the late 18th century Prussia was an army with a state rather than a state with an army. Its standing force of 200,000 men was vast for its relatively small population. A century or so later, the belief that Prussia and subsequently imperial Germany were uniquely militarised European powers was reinforced by Otto von Bismarck’s famous address to the Prussian Diet in 1862. “Not through speeches and majority decisions will the great questions of the day be decided,” he declared, “but by iron and blood.”

Peter Wilson, a military historian at Oxford, does not dispute how integral militarism has been to Germany’s past. But by providing centuries of context, he sets out to show that its history could have been different, and sometimes was.

Because of a focus on the two world wars, with perhaps a glance back to the Franco-Prussian war of 1871, a myth has evolved of a specifically German way of war, the author argues. In this telling, Germany’s position in the heart of Europe, encircled by hostile neighbours, meant it needed a first-strike capability that could only be achieved by a “power state”, an authoritarian system able to mobilise the necessary resources. This in turn has led to a further myth: of a unique German genius for war based on superior technology, skill and martial spirit. Even today, Hitler’s Wehrmacht is admired by many military types, especially in America. For Blitzkrieg, read “shock and awe”.

Much of the book is taken up with conflicts within or involving that strange entity, the Holy Roman Empire, the collection of mostly German-speaking states dominated by Habsburg Austria that, as Voltaire also quipped, was neither holy, Roman, nor an empire. At least until the middle of the 18th century, this alone made the German way of war quite different from those of unitary states such as England or France. The quasi-autonomy of the component parts, which nearly all maintained their own armies, required a decentralised and collaborative approach—the antithesis of the authoritarian model that emerged later with such awful consequences.

Despite the horrors of the Thirty Years War (1618-48), which was largely fought within the empire’s borders, and the fearsome reputation of its pike and musket formations, it was not much more prone to violence than other parts of Europe, and enjoyed long periods of relative peace. Even after the empire’s collapse following defeat to Napoleon at Jena in 1806, and its metamorphosis into the German Confederation in 1815, peace held until the revolutionary uprisings of 1848 and the war with Denmark that began in the same year. But in 1864 a second war with the Danes forged the template for future conflicts.

The chief of the general staff, Helmuth von Moltke, was charged by Bismarck with achieving a quick, decisive victory before other powers could intervene. He did so, but more by luck than good judgment. The army had triumphed, in its view, because of its freedom from political supervision, an inference that led Prussia’s rulers to place their faith ever more blindly in the top brass. That faith appeared to be vindicated when Prussia routed France in 1871, thanks to efficient mobilisation, brutally effective tactics and French mistakes. But, as Mr Wilson observes, these and other successes embedded “flaws ever deeper into the country’s institutions, only to be repeated with ever more disastrous results in the subsequent two world wars”.

Doomed to repetition

Before 1914, the unquestioned assumption of the general staff (under the leadership of Moltke the Younger, nephew of the original) was that, since a major war in Europe was inevitable, it should prepare for one. The possibility that politics or diplomacy might be more productive was barely considered. Thus the constant reworking of the notorious Schlieffen plan, which required the encirclement of French forces by racing to the coast via Belgium.

This was, says Mr Wilson, an “opening gambit rather than a strategic plan”. Everything rested on a successful first strike, with little thought for the consequences if it failed—as it did. Not only was Germany unprepared for a war of attrition against foes with advantages such as greater resources and the Royal Navy’s blockade power; it did not even start with clear and achievable aims.

Link to the rest at The Economist

But it happened. Everyone is alive and well at Casa PG. As usual, Mrs. PG is figuring out how to murder more people for her next book and PG makes the odd suggestion from time to time.

1935 was a helluva year.

From Digiday:

Much has been written about how the almighty algorithm shapes our taste in everything from food and music to movies and books, but Penguin Random House is leaning into TikTok’s major #BookTok trend to help users discover titles and engage with fellow readers.

On Tuesday, the publishing giant announced a new deal with TikTok that lets people link to books in videos using the popular #BookTok hashtag while also working with various creators to curate content. The feature will direct users to a page that has additional info about the book and the other videos about it created by various TikTok users. According to Penguin Random House chief marketing officer Sanyu Dillon, BookTok provides an “emotional journey” that is driving more successful videos compared to those that merely provide a book synopsis.

“It’s very powerful that BookTok is driven by real people, making real recommendations,” Dillon said. “And because the best videos kind of capture that feeling of a book, this, in turn, gives viewers and users more confidence in their book discovery in their path to purchase.”

For years, curated recommendations inside of bookstores have helped guide readers toward new titles they might be interested in. But does relying on a social platform like TikTok to serve up relevant content expand or limit potential readers from broadening their horizons?

It’s not necessarily just one or the other, Dillon said. She pointed out that the footprint of many bookstores often limits how many titles can be sold or how various titles are promoted on shelves. For example, she said TikTok communities within BookTok might help people to read more books in a certain category than before, provide a greater group of related authors to choose from, or help someone discover more books by their favorite authors.

Much of BookTok’s adoption has been driven by organic content from everyday users, but Penguin is trying to approach its role by co-creating content for TikTok with creators and users. Although Penguin works with thousands of creators across its various subsidiaries, it’s also hired three micro-influencers in-house, including two for TikTok and one for Instagram.

“We do understand that an algorithm can be absolutely effective, but you can kind of stay in your lane once you’re in that algorithm,” she said. “We want to kind of expand the awareness of the various categories that we publish and the authors that we are publishing every year.”

To do that, the company has recently created other tech-driven initiatives. Last year, it created a tool called Today’s Top Books which scraped data across every online platform where Penguin titles are talked about and shares those popular titles at any given moment. Penguin has also begun other more curated initiatives on other social platforms such as All Ways Black, a community on Instagram that highlights Black authors and books.

Link to the rest at Digiday

Color PG skeptical. He doesn’t claim to be an expert about TikTok or BookTok, but he does know that online communities can change directions and attitudes in a flash.

PG has doubts that Big Publishing can keep up with anything that moves very fast. And he has his doubts about cool BookToc videos are likely to spring forth from an organization that hasn’t actively engaged with ebooks (a very old technology, relatively speaking). Whenever PG imagines a world in which Amazon never existed, he wonders if TradPub would have changed at all.