Reviews and News:
A “wonderfully learned, gossipy and instructive” history of British embassies: In 1612, “a genial British diplomat, Sir Henry Wotton, got into trouble for defining an ambassador as an honest man who is sent abroad to lie for his country. Wotton’s protestation to the furious King James I that the word ‘lie’ meant merely ‘to reside’ fell on deaf ears. It was two years before the unlucky diplomat received a new posting… Back in Wotton’s day, courtier diplomats were expected to buy their own homes abroad. Only in 1799, at Lord Elgin’s request, was a plot of land granted in Constantinople for the building of the first British embassy abroad. By the 1870s, the need to protect the borders of India from Russian encroachments and defend Britain’s trade routes to the East led Queen Victoria’s government to emphasise the long reach of her jewelled grasp. Embassies arose in Gibraltar, Kuwait, New Delhi, Tehran, Cairo, Addis Ababa and Singapore. Their purpose, lightly masked by elegant hybrid architecture, was to sound forth the trumpet of British superiority.”
Michael Dirda recommends a handful of lesser-known ghost stories.
Jennifer Egan’s accomplishment: “The tension Egan builds between a safe commonplace existence and the rash and often disillusioning life of adventure is the roiling heart of her remarkable work.”
Google announces two breakthroughs in Artificial Intelligence research this week: “On Monday, researchers announced that Google’s project AutoML had successfully taught itself to program machine learning software on its own. While it’s limited to basic programming tasks, the code AutoML created was, in some cases, better than the code written by its human counterparts. In a program designed to identify objects in a picture, the AI-created algorithm achieved a 43 percent success rate at the task. The human-developed code, by comparison, only scored 39 percent on the task. On Wednesday, in a paper published in the journal Nature, DeepMind researchers revealed another remarkable achievement. The newest version of its Go-playing algorithm, dubbed AlphaGo Zero, was not only better than the original AlphaGo, which defeated the world’s best human player in May. This version had taught itself how to play the game. All on its own, given only the basic rules of the game.”
Economist Richard Sutch identifies significant empirical errors in Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century in the latest issue of Social Science History.
Witty, wistful Whit Stillman: “Comedy is not, in Stillman’s catalogue, a series of skewerings, but the story of the human condition.”
“Jann Wenner and his biographer are no longer on speaking terms. If things had gone according to Mr. Wenner’s plan, the two of them would be appearing together at parties, talks and other promotional events timed to the publication on Tuesday of the 547-page tome from Alfred A. Knopf. Instead, Mr. Wenner, the founder of Rolling Stone magazine, is distancing himself as much as possible from Joe Hagan, the writer who spent four years chronicling Mr. Wenner’s life. The reason is simple: Mr. Wenner doesn’t like the book.”
Essay of the Day:
In Literary Matters, Chad Davidson writes about the limitations of originality—in life and art:
“Two days on the island, and we—John, Ben, and I—have already fallen into a routine: rise at 7:30, run at 8:00, followed by a quick swim. Then pastries and coffee at Bar Calise, where we just can’t seem to figure out the pattern. (Do we pay for the pastries before or after we sit? Should we choose our pastries and then order coffee?) After breakfast, we work for the rest of the morning and into the early afternoon, John and I scribbling in notebooks and on our computers, Ben editing his photos. Here for some writing and photography and a good bit of enjoyment, we take our work semi-seriously; we work until it’s time to visit Gino in his shack on the beach.
“Our rental owner told us that Gino served the best bruschetta in town, and after one visit we were believers. Gino also helped us score some scooters (the best means of transportation on the island) and offered sound advice on local restaurants. In the afternoon, after bruschetta, we swim again, then work until the sunlight turns pink and maudlin, and we grow thirsty for Prosecco and Campari.
“Then we’re out the door, in search of the next best bar in all of Ischia. First, we took to the volcanic bluffs of Monte Epomeo, the highest point on the island, with 360-degree views. We drank German beer out of mismatched glass steins; no Campari, sadly. Next, Castello Aragonese near the port, a castle possessing roots back to Hieron I of Syracuse, and sporting a somewhat dubiously intentioned torture museum. We drank Campari perched on its parapets, and we are not sorry. Today, we visited a tiny winery in the hills, which traffics in tart, minerally whites, the best of which called Biancolella. We sat around a table sipping it with an American family now living in Beirut. You should totally come and check the city out, the oldest girl told us, gesturing with her wine glass, a few fingers lightly holding it near the rim. The Lebanese like their drink, too.
“Friends back home hate us. They see our photos online and seethe. We talk about the way their comments almost fall into a pattern, and we plot their vectors: from ‘Wow, that’s amazing!’ and ‘So beautiful!’ to ‘I’m jealous!’ and ‘You’re living it up!’ down to ‘Stop it’ and ‘I can’t take any more.’ Then they just cease commenting altogether. Radio silence. And yet, they see at best a quarter of our experience here, albeit the flashy part, the extraordinary—the unreal blue of the Tyrrhenian, the homey winery dug into foothill caves bleached and musty, the brilliant red (bloody, almost) tomatoes piled on the bruschetta. The other part we spend sitting on this terrace, each of us working, committed to our self-imposed structure, arbitrary, silent, and loving it.
“Does pattern simply make possible the breakage of pattern? Does ritual remind us of non-ritual and, so, offer (strangely) variation, from entropy, from chaos, from the bland everbodyness of a spinning globe? And if so, is tourism anathema to pattern? We are not tourists, we tell ourselves. We live here for a week. Rather, we play at living here.
We already like one waiter over the others as Bar Calise, the witty one, the nice one. (He knows us, we think.) We are temporary locals, or at least we act like we are.”
Photos: Central Asia’s weirdest buildings
Poem: Mark Jarman, “Exo”
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