Thinking About A.I. with Stanisław Lem

We are going to speak of the future,” the Polish writer Stanisław Lem wrote, in “Summa Technologiae,” from 1964, a series of essays, mostly on humanity and the evolution of technology. “Yet isn’t discoursing about future events a rather inappropriate occupation for those who are lost in the transience of the here and now?” Lem, who died in 2006 at the age of eighty-four, is likely the most widely read writer of science fiction who is not particularly widely read in the United States. His work has been translated into more than forty languages, many millions of copies of his books have been printed, and yet, if I polled a hundred friends, 2.3 of them would know who he was. His best-known work in the U.S. is the 1961 novel “Solaris,” and its renown stems mostly from the moody film adaptation by Andrei Tarkovsky. [ed. the 2002 Soderbergh remake with George Clooney is more faithful to the original novel.]

Among Lem’s fictional imaginings are a phantomatic generator (a machine that gives its user an extraordinarily vivid vision of an alternate reality), an opton (an electronic device on which one can read books), and a network of computers that contains information on most everything that is known and from which people have a difficult time separating themselves. Though we may have forgotten the prophet, the prophecies have not forgotten us.

Lem also wrote numerous stories about machines whose intelligence exceeds that of their creators. About two years ago, when OpenAI released ChatGPT, my initial reaction was: what a fun toy! The poems it wrote were so charming. It also seemed like an interesting form of “distant reading,” since its writing was based on having “eaten” enormous amounts of text from the Internet; it could tell us something about the language and interests people have collectively expressed online. I wasn’t too troubled about such a tool replacing more conventionally human writers. If writers have to become art therapists or math teachers or climate scientists instead, is that so bad? I am programmed, I have come to realize, to default to the reassuring assessment of “no biggie.”

A few news cycles later I was reading—and maybe thinking?—that ChatGPT and its A.I. cousins could easily be like what radio was to Hitler. (Or would it be like what the printing press was to Martin Luther?) Geoffrey Hinton, the godfather of A.I., whom we all suddenly knew about, had resigned from his position at Google and was speaking openly about everything that was likely to go wrong with his creation—a creation he appeared to regret only slightly less than Victor Frankenstein did his. There were very knowledgeable people who thought that all these concerns were nonsense and very knowledgeable people who found them terrifying. I wondered, What would Stanisław Lem think? Or, What did Stanisław Lem think, given that he so accurately foresaw enough of our modern world that he should be taken at least as seriously as Nostradamus or Pixar? (...)

“Solaris” is mostly serious in tone, which makes it a misleading example of Lem’s work. More often and more distinctively, he is funny and madcap and especially playful on the level of language. A dictionary of his neologisms, published in Poland in 2006, has almost fifteen hundred entries; translated into English, his invented words include “imitology,” “fripple,” “scrooch,” “geekling,” “deceptorite,” and “marshmucker.” (I assume that translating Lem is the literary equivalent of differential algebra, or category theory.) A representative story, from 1965, is “The First Sally (A) or, Trurl’s Electronic Bard.” Appearing in a collection titled “The Cyberiad,” the story features Trurl, an engineer of sorts who constructs a machine that can write poetry. Does the Electronic Bard read as an uncanny premonition of ChatGPT? Sure. It can write in the style of any poet, but the resulting poems are “two hundred and twenty to three hundred and forty-seven times better.” (The machine can also write worse, if asked.)

It’s not Trurl’s first machine. In other stories, he builds one that can generate anything beginning with the letter “N” (including nothingness) and one that offers supremely good advice to a ruler; the ruler is not nice, though, so it’s good that Trurl put in a subcode that the machine will not destroy its maker. The Electronic Bard is not easy for Trurl to make. In thinking about how to program it, Trurl reads “twelve thousand tons of the finest poetry” but deems the research insufficient. As he sees it, the program found in the head of even an average poet “was written by the poet’s civilization, and that civilization was in turn programmed by the civilization that preceded it, and so on to the very Dawn of Time.” The complexity of the average poet-machine is daunting.

But Trurl manages to work through all that. When glitches occur—such as the machine in early iterations thinking that Abel murdered Cain, or that “gray drapes,” rather than “great apes,” are members of the primate family—Trurl makes the necessary tweaks. He adjusts logic circuits and emotive components. When the machine becomes too sad to write, or resolves to become a missionary, he makes further adjustments. He puts in a philosophical throttle, half a dozen cliché filters, and then, last but most important, he adds “self-regulating egocentripetal narcissistors.” Finally, it works beautifully.

But how does the world around it work? Trurl’s machine responds to requests to write a lofty, tragic, timeless poem about a haircut, and to write a love poem expressed in the language of mathematics. Both poems are pretty good! But, of course, the situation has to go awry, because that is the formula by which stories work. Lem doesn’t give much space to worries about undetectably faked college essays, or displaced workers. Nor does he pursue a thought line about mis- or disinformation. (In another story, however, Trurl builds a machine that says the answer to two plus two is seven, and it threatens Trurl’s life if he won’t say that the machine is right.)

The poets have various manners of letting Trurl know their take on his invention. “The classicists . . . fairly harmless . . . confined themselves to throwing stones through his windows and smearing the sides of his house with an unmentionable substance.” Other poets beat Trurl. Picket lines form outside his hospital room, and one could hear bullets being fired. Trurl decides to destroy his Electronic Bard, but the machine, seeing the pliers in his hand, “delivered such an eloquent, impassioned plea for mercy, that the constructor burst into tears.” He spares the uncannily well-spoken machine but moves it to a distant asteroid, where it starts to broadcast its poems via radio waves; alas, they are a tremendous success. But thinking about the perils of the technology is not at the center of the story; thinking about the vanity and destructiveness of people is.

by Rivka Galchen, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Mark Pernice
[ed. A favorite author. Along the same lines/theme, see also: Matthew Salesses on the Possibilities of Climate Fiction (LitHub).]

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I saw this idea fly by on Twitter yesterday, half trolling half real:

someone should make a dating app where an LLM clone of you goes on thousands of dates with LLM clones of other people, and then your matches are when the LLMs decide to date each other.

They continue, you can literally build this right now, and later in the thread, it gets trained on your iMessages.

I mean, it’d work!

Let me point out Adams’ Electric Monk:

The Electric Monk was a labour-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself; Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe.

An Electric Monk for dating??

Why not. It’s very now.

[ ed. Suggestions that we're living in a form of the Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy. From: Tech has graduated from the Star Trek era to the Douglas Adams age (Interconnected). See also: Are We All Too Cynical for Star Trek? (The Bulwark).]

Your TV is Too Good For You

Last fall, when Netflix hiked the cost of its top-tier Ultra HD plan by 15 percent, I had finally had enough: $22.99 a month just felt like too much for the ability to see Jaws in 4K video resolution. A couple of weeks later, I heard that Max was pushing up the fee of its own 4K streaming by 25 percent. Now I wasn’t just annoyed, but confused. Super-high-res televisions are firmly ensconced as the next standard for home viewing of TV and movies. And yet, super-high-res content seems to be receding ever further into a specialty consumer niche. What happened?

4K certainly is ubiquitous; you won’t find many sets with lower resolution for sale at Best Buy. In practice, though, the technology is rarely used. Cable signals are generally mere HD, as are the standard plans on most streaming services. And the fancy new displays, as they’re placed and viewed in people’s homes, may never end up looking any sharper than the old ones, no matter what Netflix plan you have. In short, the ultra-high-definition future for TV has turned out to be a lie.

A relentless narrative of progress brought us to this point, but it did not begin in 2012, when the first 4K televisions were brought to market at roughly the price of a Honda Accord. Rather it extends back into the early days of TV, with the idea that picture quality can and always will be improved: first with the introduction of color sets, then with bigger screens, then with added pixels. But sometimes progress ends. The peak of television-picture quality, as actually seen by TV viewers, was reached 15 years ago, and we’ve been coasting ever since. Forget the cable signals and the streaming plans. Most people just can’t sit close enough to today’s televisions to make full use of their picture.

Years ago, sitting too close was the problem. If you’re old enough to remember watching cathode-ray-tube sets, you may have been enjoined to give them space: Move back from the TV! The reasons were many. Cold War–addled viewers had developed the (somewhat justified) fear that televisions emitted radiation, for one. And the TV—still known as the “boob tube” because it might turn its viewers into idiots—was considered a dangerous lure. Its resolution was another problem: If you got close enough to the tube, you could see the color image break down into the red, blue, and green phosphor dots that composed its picture.

All of these factors helped affirm the TV’s appropriate positioning—best viewed at a middle distance—and thus its proper role within the home. A television was to be seen from across the room, and it could be used as much for ambience as for focused viewing. A soap opera or a news program or a cartoon might be on while people in the house read newspapers, balanced checkbooks, cooked meals, or vacuumed—the second-screen activities of the age before second screens. The media theorist Marshall McLuhan famously described television as a “cool” medium, one that provides somewhat meager sensory stimulation, as opposed to a “hot” medium such as cinema, which intensely targets the eyes and ears. (...)

But television technology pressed on. A 4K TV has four times the resolution of an HD set, which suggests that screens might get even hotter, even bigger than they’ve ever been before. In practice, though, these newer sets haven’t really changed the medium at all. If anything, all of those pixels have allowed too much; they’ve become decoupled from the normal scale of domestic life and home design. According to the many TV-size-to-distance calculators available online, when you’re sitting on a couch a dozen feet from your television, a 65-inch screen will look the same whether it’s HD or 4K. The latter has more pixels, but your eyes won’t pick them up. You’ll never know the difference. For the picture to look much better—for you to “see” the benefits of modern ultra-high resolution—you’d need to upgrade to a preposterously large screen, more than 100 inches in diagonal. 

by Ian Bogost, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Brian Finke / Gallery Stock
[ed. I remember when having a large TV sitting prominently in the middle of your living room used to be considered kind of gauche; an indicator of a somewhat limited interior/cultural life. Man, have times changed. Even now 32 in. is still my max (and it's fine).]

This Bookshop is Paying People to Sit Down and Read Quietly

Fort Collins, Colo. — The reader-in-residence position at Perelandra Bookshop doesn’t make sense on paper. Unlike an artist-in-residence or a writer-in-residence program, which provide a stipend and studio space for creating new work, the reader-in-residence isn’t expected to produce anything.

The reader-in-residence doesn’t have to write an essay. They don’t have to host a book club or moderate a panel discussion. They don’t have to contribute to a blog or create sponsored content. They don’t have to do anything, except show up to the bookstore a couple of times per week and read.

“I think the residence paralleled my own personal concerns about the extent to which we focus ourselves on production,” said Joe Braun, principal book buyer at Perelandra, and the person who dreamed up the position. “In focusing on production, foregrounding content creation, what we do is necessarily create a consumer in the process. The idea is: produce, consume, produce, consume.”

Braun wanted to break that cycle. Is the residency replicable? Maybe. Is it scalable? Probably not. But that has never been the point. The point is to envision what a bookshop can do, not what it already is, Braun said.

“Having gone through undergrad and grad school — even though they were great experiences — there was that constant drive to show that you understand. To make something of your understanding. I’m like, you know what, we kind of just need understanding. We don’t always need proof of it,” he said.

The reader gets a small stipend for their three-month stint — $50 per month for books, and another $50 per month for coffee. They also have access to Perelandra’s wholesale book catalog. The overt goal of the residency is to foster a space for people to experience literature more thoughtfully. The underlying goal is to make them want to smash their phones with a sledgehammer.

“We do so much reading now, but it’s mostly reading for information at best. At best. At worst it’s like a pure little shot of dopamine before moving to the next post,” said Steven Shafer, Perelandra’s current reader-in-residence. “It is almost the exact opposite of what I’ve gotten to experience here.”

Shafer was selected the way all of Perelandra’s readers have been selected so far: Through word-of-mouth. The first book he read during his residency, which lasts through March, was “Brave New World” by Aldous Huxley. He had different takeaways this time around, almost 20 years since he first read the book.

“When you’re 18, you feel like ‘Yeah definitely, fight the man! Become a revolutionary!’ And then 20 years on it’s kind of like, ‘Eh, I’m definitely part of the system.’ I don’t know if I’d be the one necessarily to step up and try to burn it all down. I’d probably say, like, let’s take a breath, there’s a lot at stake here.”

That’s kind of the formula of the entire bookstore: A little bit of fight the man mixed with a little bit of let’s take a breath.

by Parker Yamasaki, The Colorado Sun |  Read more:

Image: Olivia Sun, The Colorado Sun via Report for America
[ed. See also: Bring Back the Big, Comfortable Bookstore Reading Chair (LitHub).]

Helen Units

A helen is a humorous unit of measurement based on the concept that Helen of Troy had a "face that launched a thousand ships". The helen is thus used to measure quantities of beauty in terms of the theoretical action that could be accomplished by the wielder of such beauty.

The classic reference to Helen's beauty is Marlowe's lines from the 1592 play The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, "Was this the face that launch'd a thousand ships / And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?" In the tradition of humorous pseudounits, then, 1 millihelen is the amount of beauty needed to launch a single ship.

In his 1992 collection of jokes and limericks, Isaac Asimov claimed to have invented the term in the 1940s as a graduate student. In a 1958 letter to the New Scientist, R.C. Winton proposes the millihelen as the amount of beauty required to launch one ship. In response, P. Lockwood noted that the unit had been independently proposed by Edgar J. Westbury and extended by the pair to negative values, where −1 millihelen was the amount of ugliness required to sink a battleship.

The earliest known print citation is found in Punch magazine dated June 23 1954 and attributed to an unnamed "professor of natural philosophy".

by Wikipedia |  Read more:

Image:Helen leaving for Troy with Paris, as depicted by Guido Reni

[ed. My mom's name was Helen; it's my grandaughter's middle name, too.]

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The Fairy-Tale Promises of Montessori Parenting

Giving my 4-year-old a random food without explanation to see what he does,” an automated voice says at the start of a TikTok from the parenting influencer known as LauraLove. She hands her son, Carter, a container of ricotta cheese. He announces quickly: He’ll make stuffed shells.

Carter seems incredibly prepared, standing on a platform to reach the stove. He seasons the beef, cooks the pasta, mixes the filling, and stuffs the shells. Sure, his motions are clumsy and he goofs off while he works. But the end dish looks pretty good. Even more compelling, though, might be how Carter responds to his mistakes. When he drops a stuffed shell upside down, he makes a joke. When he splashes egg on himself, he doesn’t flinch. “I got a little wet,” he says. “But that’s fine. That happens when you’re cooking.”

The whole video—Carter’s demeanor, the equipment he stands on, even the choice of activity—is filled with the hallmarks of Montessori parenting. You might recognize the name Montessori from the group of schools known for prioritizing child autonomy and learning through play. Though the parenting approach is not officially affiliated with Montessori education, you can think of it as a sort of DIY descendant, in which people apply many of the same concepts in a new realm. Recently it’s become highly visible, in large part because of social media. (LauraLove, for instance, has nearly 8 million followers.) Now Montessori influences pervade the design of playrooms, popular toys, and even the general ethos of self-sufficiency that defines many modern child-rearing theories.

I was curious about the philosophy’s appeal, so I spoke with seven Montessori-parenting adherents. Some were stay-at-home parents; others had to balance caregiving with paid work. Many told me about being nervous first-time parents who just wanted a child-rearing style to rely on. Indeed, Mairin Augustine, a researcher who studies parenting, told me that applying Montessori educational ideas to raising kids can amount to good parenting. (Even if it is dressed up in impressive branding and comes with a whole lot of merch.) But while Montessori parenting can be rewarding, it can also be particularly expensive and labor-intensive.

Of course, TikToks like the one of Carter cooking leave a lot out. Clearly this wasn’t his first time in the kitchen. (LauraLove does have other videos where she teaches her sons to cook, and admitted in a comment that she gave Carter “a little help here & there,” but said he “remembered & did most of it on his own.”) As any parent will tell you, such videos just aren’t representative of what cooking with young kids is typically like.

“Make time for your child to do things in her own way and at her own pace,” the Association Montessori Internationale’s parenting website preaches. A lovely idea, but not exactly a practical one for many parents. When making muffins, for example, Nicole Kavanaugh, the creator of a Montessori-parenting blog and podcast, told me that she might be eager to dump the batter into the tin, “but my child might want to sit and whisk.” Waiting for a kid to finish can be logistically disruptive, but for Kavanaugh, the greater struggle was often mental. She described literally sitting on her hands to stop herself from intervening in one of her children’s tasks.

Depictions of Montessori parenting, particularly on social media, can make it seem like a prescription for idyllic family life—they suggest that your kid, too, could be cooking fancy Italian meals at age 4, and that tantrums could be easily defused by empathetic conversation, and that your home could also be effortlessly tidy, if you just adopted Montessori. But raising kids isn’t so simple, and even parents who are willing and able to invest the money, time, and emotional work in this method may find themselves disappointed when expectations butt up against reality. Ultimately, no one can escape the hard truth: No matter how hard you work to organize a playroom, you can’t eliminate chaos or uncertainty from parenting.

The montessori approach to parenting is rooted in a respected pedagogical system started in the early 20th century by the Italian educator Maria Montessori. She preached that kids were innately orderly, focused, and self-motivated, and should be given freedom to choose what they learn. She believed that play is educational, and she filled schoolrooms with what others saw as mere toys. She found value in housework, too, and had students do chores as part of their lessons. She lamented that the world was not built to be accessible to children—and she created a school that was. Its philosophy lives on in the many modern-day schools that bear her name.

When Simone Davies, the author of the popular book The Montessori Toddler, discovered the approach about 20 years ago, Montessori schools had already started to proliferate in the U.S. Yet Davies, who is based in Amsterdam, struggled to find any books that explained how to implement these principles at home. But over the past decade, Kavanaugh told me, platforms such as Instagram and YouTube have become a “breeding ground” for Montessori parenting. Those platforms are visual, and the philosophy lends itself well to striking aesthetics: The playrooms tend to be clean and minimalist; watching a 2-year-old chop vegetables is mesmerizing. “It was just this perfect storm,” Kavanaugh said. Add the tie to a prestigious educational brand, and it’s no wonder the approach has taken off.

But much of what is labeled Montessori today has little meaningful association with the original philosophy. Because the name was never trademarked, anyone can use it. (The Association Montessori Internationale, which Maria co-founded with her son, offers certifications to schools and teachers, but those are optional.) So-called Montessori toys abound: See, for example, the Pikler triangle—also billed as a “Montessori Climber,” despite having been created by a different pioneer in early education—a sort of glorified ladder that sells for as much as $299. The Montessori aesthetic has become so heavily marketed that if you mention Montessori on a parenting board, people may think you mean beige wooden blocks, not a radical pedagogical approach that centers children’s needs.

The actual parenting philosophy is adapted from Maria’s educational principles as well as comments she made about parents’ role in child development. At its core, Montessori parenting is defined by three main features. The first, and most important, Davies told me, is a gentle and respectful way of interacting with children that does away with traditional discipline and encourages independence. The second involves creating what is known as a “prepared space”: a well-organized area for kids to play in, with child-size furniture and objects that are all within the child’s reach. The final element is facilitating specialized activities depending on the kid’s age, which can be educational play or helping with chores—like cooking.

Psychologists generally agree that the ideal parenting style is “authoritative” and is characterized by high levels of warmth and control. That means “having consistent messages about what I want from you, but knowing that I love you,” Augustine told me. Many of Maria’s ideas fit nicely under that umbrella. Certain fringe Montessori beliefs are not evidence-backed. (For instance, Maria notoriously preached that cribs, the safest place for infants to sleep, were inhumane cages.) But the overall approach is largely aligned with that authoritative-parenting ideal. (...)

The parents I spoke with who answered that call weren’t necessarily expecting perfection, nor were they completely drawn in by social media’s illusions. Still, when Montessori didn’t work as expected, they tended to be disappointed. Many blamed themselves, but few criticized the philosophy itself. Indeed, Montessori has a principle that makes it customizable but also impossible to disprove: “Follow the child”—which roughly means Be responsive to your kid. So, for example, if a kid doesn’t like a Montessori-style activity a parent spent hours creating, that doesn’t mean something’s wrong with the activity; that means the parent didn’t understand their child’s needs. (...)

Montessori is remarkable for the extent to which it takes children seriously, involving innovations small (art hung at kids’ eye level in their own rooms) and large (putting play at the center of children’s education). The parenting style encourages kids to express themselves—and sometimes, for toddlers, that self-expression involves throwing fits. No amount of respect for your children’s emotional life can change that. The implication that Montessori would make parenting orderly and predictable was always doomed to fail. But the philosophy does give parents something to steady themselves while living through the havoc of helping someone else grow up.

by Kate Cray, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Katie Martin

[ed. Just treat them like normal people, which means not being overly authoritative or protective (a necessity sometimes, but children know when it's needed), or talking down to them; mainly just being yourself and letting them see and interact with you as your own self, not just a parent. It provides a good baseline and context for their own growth (hopefully); and mutual respect. And don't forget to help and support them in finding their own interests and independence. See also: Protocols for Excellent Parenting & Improving Relationships of All Kinds (Huberman Lab):]

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[ed. At least he got an autograph.]

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Return of Anthony Kim

Golf’s great prodigy turned mysterious recluse is returning to the sport after 12 years. Anthony Kim joined LIV Golf and will play in the league’s event in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, this week as a wild card.

“After stepping away from the game years ago due to injury, I’m happy to officially announce my return to the world of professional golf,” Kim said in a news release Wednesday. “It’s been a long time coming, and I’m very grateful for all the highs, lows and lessons learned from the first part of my career.

“I want to compete with the best players in the world, and I’m on a mission to prove to myself that I can win again. The next step on that journey starts now, and I’m excited to give everything I’ve got this season on the LIV Golf League.”

Kim will compete in all remaining 2024 LIV Golf regular-season tournaments as a wild-card player aiming to accrue points in the league’s individual standings and earn a team place in 2025.

LIV commissioner Greg Norman teased Kim’s return in a video on social media Monday, and Kim’s presence on the driving range did not go unnoticed Tuesday. Sports Business Journal’s Josh Carpenter snapped a photo of a placard featuring Kim’s name, and then YouTube golfer Andy Carter posted a video of Kim’s range session on Instagram.

Kim, now 38, was once one of golf’s biggest rising stars who won two PGA Tour events and made a Ryder Cup team by 23 behind exciting talent and a big personality that reached sections of fans golf often struggled to reach before. Injuries then led to Kim stepping away from professional golf at 26 and never returning.

Kim has become a cult-like figure in the time since, in part because he was such a popular player with enormous potential, but also because of the mystery that has shrouded his absence. During his playing days, Kim was known as a partier who had a complicated relationship with how much he loved golf. So when his injuries led to him stepping away and reports surfaced of him living off an insurance policy worth somewhere between $10 and $20 million, it meant only more fascination with whether or not he actually couldn’t play anymore.

So when Golf.com reported in January that Kim was eyeing a return and was in negotiations with both the PGA Tour and LIV, the intrigue only skyrocketed. Now, Kim is finally returning and playing with LIV, a league backed by the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia which can likely afford to give Kim a signing bonus to help with the insurance policy, in addition to massive purses at events. Kim is expected to play as a single this week and not part of LIV’s 13 teams.

The complicated element is what Kim’s return means and what to expect. Before Rory McIlroy and Jordan Spieth, Kim was golf’s great young prodigy, expected to take some portion of Tiger Woods’ place in golf’s limelight. The Los Angeles native played college golf at Oklahoma and played on a winning Walker Cup team before turning pro at 22. Kim won two PGA Tour events at Quail Hollow and TPC Potomac by his second full pro season and became the first golfer under 25 to win two tour events in the same season since Woods in 2000. By the end of that 2008 season, Kim was 23, No. 6 in the world and the top rising star in the sport.

With an extremely aggressive style of play and an outgoing personality, Kim immediately became a star in demographics golf didn’t always reach. He made the 2008 Ryder Cup team at 23 years old — young for a spot on that team at that time — and he famously dominated Sergio Garcia with a 5&4 drubbing as the U.S. won for the first time in nine years. That next spring, Kim went to the 2009 Masters and broke the tournament record with 11 birdies in the second round. That may have turned out to be his peak. (...)

But while his absence meant Kim didn’t get to become the star some hoped for, it also meant he didn’t have to go through the normal peaks and valleys of a career. The shine eventually comes off all young players, but being away meant being frozen in time as a beacon of potential.

by Brody Miller and Jenna West, The Athletic | Read more:
Image: Jon Ferrey/LIV Golf

Noksu: The Best of Tasting-Menu Culture Meets the Worst

At Noksu, dinner is served below the street, a few yards from the subway turnstiles. But the room and the food seem unmoored from any particular place.

I can’t remember the last New York restaurant that frustrated me as much as Noksu.

My frustration won’t be widely shared, given how few people can afford to eat there. Dinner is $225 for about 12 courses, before tax, tip or drinks. Drinks can be paired with each course for another $175 (with alcohol) or $100 (without).

It would be easier to dismiss Noksu if it weren’t for the cooking of its chef, Dae Kim. This is the first kitchen he has run and he’s full of talent, a star in the making. But his ideas need to be shaped and formed, and the setting he’s working in is so generic that it distracts from what’s distinctive in his cooking.

Most of what holds Noksu back are things it shares with, and may have copied from, other expensive tasting-menu restaurants. It tries so hard to fit in with Atomix, Kono, Chef’s Table at Brooklyn Fare and other places that it forgets to assert any identity of its own.

Noksu got some press early on because of its location, one flight below ground inside the 34th Street-Herald Square subway station. Apparently, the concept of $400 dinners a few yards from the turnstiles and tracks struck a lot of people as novel. I’m not sure why. Another generation would have called it slumming.

A few minutes before each of the two nightly services, a rolling gate clatters up to reveal a locked door with a keypad. To get inside, I punched in a six-digit code that had been texted to me several hours before. Behind the door was a heavy, floor-to-ceiling curtain. By this point, I was prepared to see anything behind it. A private sex club? Agent Cooper?

But there was nothing like that, just the usual tasting-menu layout, a counter of banded marble facing a stainless steel kitchen where half a dozen cooks in white jackets stood intently over rows of white porcelain bowls, heads bowed like monks.

They stayed in that position, making tiny adjustments to whatever was in those bowls, for about 10 minutes. I had time to settle in, ask for a drink and look around. Time to wonder whether Noksu’s secret door inside a subway station was supposed to remind me of the secret door at Brooklyn Fare (inside a supermarket near the jams and jellies) or the one at Frevo (behind one of the artworks hanging in a storefront gallery) or the one at the Office of Mr. Moto (opened by a code embedded in a cipher).

And I had time to ask why so many tasting-menu restaurants, no matter how they disguise their entrance, look the same inside: the long counter of polished stone or wood or steel; the upholstered stools so tall and heavy that servers need to help you get into and out of them, as if you were a small child getting into a highchair; the blank, windowless walls.

There are restaurants like this in almost every major city now, imitation pearls on a string that circles the world. Once the door closes, you could be anywhere, or nowhere. How did chefs who prize both originality and a sense of place decide that the most appropriate backdrop for their food would be copycat rooms done in a blank-faced global style?

Noksu’s design doesn’t do Mr. Kim any favors. Neither does the playlist, which runs through the most obvious megahits of the ’80s by Toto, Don Henley, even Huey Lewis and the News. It’s as if you’d accepted a dinner invitation from Patrick Bateman.

Mr. Kim has a collection of gifts that any young cook might covet: an eye for arranging dishes that invite you in by holding back a few secrets; an affinity for seafood, which is at the center of nearly every course; an impressive technical control that allows him to spherify truffle juice and spin fragile rye tuiles in Spirograph lattices.

Over and over, he pulled off complex dishes that would be tricky in a kitchen twice as big as Noksu’s. There was a miniature tart not much larger than a bottle cap, filled with firm raw fluke, maitake mushrooms glazed with Madeira, and crunchy threads of leek. Marinated rock shrimp were folded inside a slice of raw bluefin, scored for tenderness; this all-seafood wrap was surrounded by a dark and quietly spicy liquid that tasted of long-caramelized onions and carrots. (It would be delicious over prime rib, too, if this were that kind of restaurant.)

Sardines cured in plum vinegar were garnished with individual potato chips and wisps of radicchio in an uncannily smooth Caesar dressing. Many courses made my eyes go wide with something like wonder. There were filigrees of wildflowers, mysterious little tuna-belly creatures with mustard-seed eyes and microgreen antennae, and something that looked like a slice of black truffle but melted like butter.

I never doubted Mr. Kim’s skill, or patience, or readiness to spend a huge amount of labor on dishes that take less than a minute to eat. But what he is trying to say, I’m not quite sure. (...)

There were dishes so uncannily good they made me suspect Mr. Kim was receiving secret transmissions from another world, like the medium-rare slice of wild coho salmon with a pistachio-celery sauce on one side and a fluffy swoosh of yuzu hollandaise on the other. And I would not want to have missed the moment when, after the gentle Impressionist brushwork of the seafood courses, he suddenly goes Damien Hirst, serving a delicious and completely unadorned squab, its crisp skin lacquered with red vinegar and malt sugar like a duck in a Chinatown window and its deep-fried head cradled in the curled toes of its foot.

The boldness of that squab represented tasting-menu cuisine at its best. One night, though, it was followed by a venison dish served at room temperature; I could only pick at it.

Lukewarm food is so common in this style of cooking that somebody in the movie “The Menu” tells the autocratic chef, “Even your hot dishes are cold.” Some of the film’s dialogue turns up at Noksu almost verbatim, as when a server volunteered that one dish is “so beautiful I can’t eat it.” Each course was served with precise instructions on how to transport it from plate to mouth. Not that I blame the servers. When diners at restaurants like this aren’t given any instructions, they become so confused they’ll ask what “chef recommends.” Seeing a restaurant full of grown adults waiting for permission to eat with a spoon really makes you wonder how it is that humans haven’t died out yet.

How can the people behind Noksu not see what was obvious to the makers of “The Menu” — that the conventions of tasting menus have become laughable clichés? 

by Pete Wells, NY Times |  Read more:

Images: Rachel Vanni for The New York Times

Mel Parsons

[ed. Good news, my computer's fixed. Bad news, my Roku and TV aren't talking to each other now. Some bad little cloud hanging around lately [update: fixed!... just a broken cable]. See also: Slow Burn LIVE at LOHO.]

[ed. Uh, oh. Dead computer. Posts might be sporadic for a while. Sorry.]

via:

My Comments are in the Google Doc Linked in the Dropbox I Sent in the Slack

Thanks for sending this along. I left my comments in the Google Doc.

You don’t see my comments? You’re looking at the old document. I copied your Google Doc and made a new Google Doc called “Proposal v2 – Comments.” Once you have my comments, put everything together in “Proposal v3 FINAL.” Then, if you don’t mind copy-pasting your new document link into the spreadsheet where we keep track of all the document links, that would be perfect. And, of course, make sure you’re in the most current spreadsheet (Copy of Spreadsheet COPY_01).

You still don’t see the link? It’s right there on the bottom of the Slack thread from yesterday about which shared drive folders link to Dropbox folders that contain all the shared PDFs. Oh, my mistake; it’s actually at the bottom of a thread about what everyone had for lunch yesterday. Here I’ll send it to you again. I just replied to an email to Jeff with the link and asked him to forward it to you. The subject line is “Email.”

The document won’t open? I’m not sure how I could make this any easier. Okay, I reset the document permissions, but you’ll need to sign into the email document_view@busycompany.org via the password I texted you via iMessage. Once you sign into the email, it’ll ask you to create a Microsoft Teams account. You’ll find the link to the document in the Teams channel called “NO DOCUMENTS LINKS!!!” From there, you’ll find a link to a couple of WeTransfers of the current .docs. Every WeTransfer link is expired. To find the non-expired link, you’ll have to look through the email thread I forwarded you saying, “FYI.” It should be 110-120 emails deep in the thread.

Once you find a link, you’ll download the 17 GB PowerPoint file, which is password-protected. You’ll need the password from our company password document. This should be in the shared Z:// drive that was set up in 2002, and to open the Excel sheet, you’ll need to make sure your computer is running on Windows 98. From there, you’ll use the password to open the company’s orientation PowerPoint and find the link to the main Dropbox folder. The Dropbox contains all the links to the Box folders, which contain all the links to the Google Drive folders, which nobody can see, hear, or touch. This is where things get tricky. The Google Drive folder is, admittedly, a tad disorganized, so you’ll need to click on thirty-seven different documents with names that have nothing to do with what’s in the document. You’ll need to read most of the document to infer who wrote it and what year. You’re looking for the document I wrote yesterday. The comments should be right in there.

Jesus. Do you just want me to fax these things to you?! Look, to make things easier, I started a thirty-day free trial of Asana. I also set up trials of Monday, Airtable, Jira, Workday, Loom, Boom, Flunt, Pringo, Viver, Blabby, Tired, Burbble, Ü, and Bungle apps, and signed you up for each. Then I posted the document in the comments section of the posting for your job on Indeed.com. Just kidding, you’re not fired. But please do reapply by sending a résumé and cover letter to gain access to Google Drive.

You know what? Should I just walk over to your desk, and we can go through them out loud?

by Gwynna Forgham-Thrift, McSweeny's |  Read more:

Image: WikiHow/Fair Use

Shigeo Sekito

Nicola Jane Stratton Tyler, Pelargonium oil study

Eddie Martin