Finn Cohen

November Preview

Dash Lewis’s conversation with billy woods

“Past Futures” will be published in the November issue of The Sun, but we’re inviting you to read it a bit early because we think Dash Lewis’s conversation with billy woods is important to mull over in the coming weeks, regardless of what happens on Nov. 5 (or beyond).

Woods is not a politician or a political theorist or a pundit. He is a rapper whose work over the past two decades has undoubtedly been shaped and influenced by the decisions and attendant consequences that come from the offices of power around the world. In his conversation with Lewis woods talks about the cycles that have defined much of human history while also acknowledging how unpredictable they can be. While not necessarily comforting, woods’s view of the world is at once tangled and clear minded.

Blind History

Tiffany Griffin on America’s Narrow View of Africa

China is racist. Russia is racist. The US is racist. . . . Africans need to bet on each other. The Black Diaspora and the Global South need to bet on and support each other.

Two Guys Walk into a Bar

Kliph Nesteroff on the Evolution of American Comedy

But I’m talking about joke structure; you’re asking about the purpose of comedy as a whole. When my first book came out, people would ask me in interviews, “Why is comedy important?” I don’t know that it is. There are lots of people, believe it or not, who don’t care about comedy. And they can live to the age of eighty or ninety.

Down in the Valley

Wendy Liu on the Tech Industry’s Power to Divide Us

Once I saw the development of new technology in class terms—how a particular kind of technology gives one group of people power over another—it started to feel more sinister.

Transformation

Jen Silverman on Writing for Different Mediums

I caught up with Jen Silverman late this summer, after we finished the edits on “Scale,” their new short story in our October issue. Jen was a few months into returning to New York City from Japan, where they worked as a producer and writer on the Max series Tokyo Vice. Jen had just switched gears back to theater, working on the book for a new musical with the composer Dave Malloy, workshopping an upcoming new play called Spain about propaganda, and wondering how long the writers’ strike in Hollywood (which has since ended) would keep a number of other projects on hold.

Kelefa Sanneh Interview Playlist

My conversation with Kelefa Sanneh covered so many artists and so many genres that we thought readers would enjoy a playlist. My hope is that something here gets stuck in your head long enough to prompt some investigating of your own.

Open Ears

Kelefa Sanneh On What Popular Music Can Teach Us About Each Other

It wouldn’t surprise me if people looked back in twenty or thirty years and said, “This was the Bad Bunny era” — that those Spanish-language musicians have the same kind of influence today as the hip-hop pioneers and the punk pioneers did in the 1970s.

Speaking Of Tongues

Justin E.H. Smith On The Mysteries Of Language

This is an extremely creative and spontaneous moment for language. There are whole sociolects that you and I don’t even know about, because we’re too old or we don’t belong to the communities of people who have come up with them. Emoji are fascinating because they’re a return to the ideographic sources of a lot of writing.

Heavy Lifting

Casey Johnston on Diet Culture and Exercise

Our interview this month with Jaclyn A. Siegel [“The Strong, Silent Type,” by Sam Risak] focuses on masculinity and male body image, and part of that discussion addresses muscle dysmorphia that is characterized by an obsessive focus on muscularity and associated with weight lifting. But there’s an aspect of weight training that can be beneficial to everyone. The writer Casey Johnston has been advocating that idea for several years, after discovering that picking up heavy things in deliberate ways could improve her quality of life. In the past year her newsletter, She’s a Beast, has become popular enough (23,000 subscribers) to land her a book deal about her experiences with weight lifting.

Under The Surface

Güven Güzeldere On The Mysteries Of Consciousness And Artificial Intelligence

Cohen: This summer, a Google engineer named Blake Lemoine caused controversy by disclosing a conversation with an AI called LaMDA, or “Language Model for Dialog Applications.” The conversation seemed to suggest this AI system had some awareness of itself, but the idea was dismissed by a number of people who work with such systems.

Güzeldere: It’s interesting that Google fired the guy who published that conversation. . . . People are saying, “Oh, it’s just a hack,” but it’s a very impressive hack. I think it will become a product that will be accepted by consumers.