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The Reading File: Excerpts from interesting articles

 
FILE - In this Feb. 21, 2018 file photo, Kendrick Lamar performs at the Brit Awards 2018 in London. Lamar was nominated for five BET Awards including ones for best collaboration, with Rihanna for "Loyalty," video of the year, album of the year and Coca-Cola Viewersâ\u0088\u009A¢â\u0080\u009A\u0082 \u0308â\u0080\u009A\u0084¢ Choice.  (Photo by Joel C Ryan/Invision/AP, File) NYET252
FILE - In this Feb. 21, 2018 file photo, Kendrick Lamar performs at the Brit Awards 2018 in London. Lamar was nominated for five BET Awards including ones for best collaboration, with Rihanna for "Loyalty," video of the year, album of the year and Coca-Cola Viewersâ\u0088\u009A¢â\u0080\u009A\u0082 \u0308â\u0080\u009A\u0084¢ Choice. (Photo by Joel C Ryan/Invision/AP, File) NYET252
Published May 25, 2018

Black life is about the group

In the New York Review of Books, Darryl Pinckney considers "The Afro-Pessimist Temptation." Read his essay in full at http://bit.ly/2xcdzpY. Here's an excerpt.

My father used to say that integration had little to do with sitting next to white people and everything to do with black people gaining access to better neighborhoods, decent schools, their share. Life for blacks was not what it should be, but he saw that as a reason to keep on, not check out. I had no idea how much better things were than they had been when he was my age, he said. That white people spent money in order to suppress the black vote proved that voting was a radical act. ...

A couple of decades later I was resenting my father speaking of my expatriate life as a black literary tradition, because I understood him to be saying that I wasn't doing anything new and, by the way, there was no such thing as getting away from being black, or what others might pretend that meant. Black life is about the group, and even if we tell ourselves that we don't care anymore that America glorifies the individual in order to disguise what is really happening, this remains a fundamental paradox in the organization of everyday life for a black person. Your head is not a safe space.

Think like a robot

At AIWeirdness.com, research scientist Janelle Shane explains how "in machine learning, the human programmer merely gives the algorithm the problem to be solved, and through trial-and-error the algorithm has to figure out how to solve it." Sometimes the computer solves a different problem altogether. Read "When Algorithms Surprise Us" in full at http://bit.ly/2KP48Pm. Here's an excerpt.

There's a long tradition of using simulated creatures to study how different forms of locomotion might have evolved, or to come up with new ways for robots to walk. Why walk when you can flop? In one example, a simulated robot was supposed to evolve to travel as quickly as possible. But rather than evolve legs, it simply assembled itself into a tall tower, then fell over. Some of these robots even learned to turn their falling motion into a somersault, adding extra distance.

Questioning cultural power

In the New Yorker, Amanda Petrusich analyzes performance art, including an event she attended that "felt familiar, and conceptually limp. Because I found little significance in the act of beholding the performance (i.e. I was helplessly, catastrophically bored). I tried to understand it metaphorically. But the process of attempting to wring meaning from (it) was excruciating." Read "Why Are Pop Stars Trying to Be Performance Artists?" in full at http://bit.ly/2s6VuUk. Here's an excerpt.

I can understand how the performance-art tradition, rooted in ideas of upheaval and impermanence, could be easily and successfully adopted by pop stars — in a way, they already trade in those things. But musicians as massively successful as Kanye West, Lady Gaga, Jay-Z, and A$AP Rocky can't effectively rattle the culture because they are the culture. For pop stars, engaging in performance art feels less about conveying something new and meaningful to their audiences and more about imbuing their careers with the kind of seriousness previously reserved for less commercial artists.

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But even that feels like a strange, outmoded neurosis — the rapper Kendrick Lamar, after all, just won a Pulitzer Prize. The distinctions between highbrow, middlebrow, and lowbrow have never felt fuzzier or less meaningful. Centers of cultural power are being questioned, if not dismantled. And performance art, like any art, should be judged by what it moves in the beholder, not what it broadcasts about the artist.

Worth a thousand words?

In the New York Times Magazine, Teju Cole ponders the meaning of photographs of war and suffering. Read "What Does It Mean to Look at This?" in full at https://nyti.ms/2GLYL0Z. Here's an excerpt.

A photograph of a group of suffering people: We look at them, and from the sadness of their expressions and gestures, we know something awful has happened. But finding out exact details, through the photograph alone, is more difficult. Who these sufferers are, why they suffer, who or what caused the suffering and what ought to be done about it: These are entirely more complex questions, questions hard to answer only by looking at the photograph.

The accounts journalists typically give of their motivations, particularly in photographing violence, aren't always convincing. Why go off to wars or conflict zones at great personal risk to take pictures of people whose lives are in terrifying states of disarray? The answer is often tautological: The images are physically dangerous and psychologically costly to make, and therefore they must be the right images.

Susan Sontag, probably the most influential writer on the intersection of violence and photography, didn't buy this argument. With forensic prose, she cut through complacent apologias for war photography and set photojournalistic images of violence squarely in the context of viewers' voyeurism.