Grand Theft Voice

 Let’s try an experiment. Read the following quote by Morgan Freeman.

When you read it, did you hear Morgan Freeman’s distinctive baritone? Likely. There are memes all over the internet that ask you that very same question. It’s the natural outcome of having such a well-known voice and style.

But, as you may have guessed, that’s not actually a Morgan Freeman quote. It’s from Malcolm X. (And if you try to say it now in Malcolm X’s voice, you may find yourself actually borrowing Denzel Washington's voice in playing Malcolm X. “We didn’t land on Plymouth Rock: Plymouth Rock landed on us.”

So we could say I borrowed Morgan Freeman’s voice for this little thought experiment. Or nearer the mark would be to say I appropriated it. But to be truthful, I stole it. I stole Freeman’s likability, his air of authority, professionalism, and integrity. With Morgan Freeman, such antics are usually in the name of fun, but reassigning attribution of quotes to someone with more authority or a wider audience is endemic on the internet. Figures from Thomas Jefferson to Kurt Vonnegut have been misappropriated in this fashion. There have been a rash of pronouncements supposedly by the new pope that never passed his lips. I’m probably not telling you anything new here.

But now here’s an honest-god-quote from The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century's Greatest Dilemma, a recent book by AI pioneer Mustafa Suleyman:

Mutants

 

Maybe it's time we talked about mutants. No, not cool mutants with cool powers. I'm talking about the ever-growing minority who seem to have been born without the gene for empathy. Call them homo miserabilis. How long have they been among us? Are they here to stay? Does their mutation give them an advantage over homo sapiens that will eventually write our demise as a species? Is there some sort of treatment we can administer? Can we co-exist with them? I would have preferred mutations like eye-blasts and teleportation, and would have gotten along fine with our blue furry cousins. But evolution is an asshole.

Okay, maybe these narcissists—let’s call them what they are— aren’t mutants, but I became curious about the seeming decline of empathy, which a lot of people seem to have noticed and become alarmed by. Is all the evidence simply anecdotal? Turns out not. Here are two developments:

James Stephens on books

James Stephens, an Irish contemporary of James Joyce, largely forgotten today, wrote one of my three favorite books, The Crock of Gold -- a tale like no other I've ever read: by turns humorous, philosophical and poetic, whose premise is what happens when the leprechauns of Gort na Cloca Mora exact revenge for having their pot of gold stolen. 

So it seems incumbent upon me to share a couple of quotes from the man.

“He saw a square room furnished as a library. The entire section of the walls which he could spy was covered from floor to ceiling with books. There were volumes of every size, every shape, every colour. There were long, narrow books that held themselves like grenadiers at stiff attention. There were short, fat books that stood solidly like aldermen who were going to make speeches and were ashamed but not frightened. 

There were mediocre books bearing themselves with the carelessness of folk who are never looked at and have consequently no shyness. There were solemn books that seemed to be feeling for their spectacles; and there were tattered, important books that had got dirty because they took snuff, and were tattered because they had been crossed in love and had never married afterwards. There were prim, ancient tomes that were certainly ashamed of their heroines and utterly unable to obtain a divorce from the hussies; and there were lean, rakish volumes that leaned carelessly, or perhaps it was with studied elegance, against their neighbours, murmuring in affected tones, "All heroines are charming to us.

--The Demi-Gods

Review: Dinner with King Tut

 

Dinner with King Tut is a strange sort of beast: let’s call it an anti-sphinx. Like the sphinx it’s composed of three dissimilar parts—not the face of a woman, the wings of a bird and the haunches of a lion, but science, fiction (but not science fiction) and DIY—where DIY involves the author learning how to knap stones, how to tattoo himself, to style hair like an ancient Roman matron, bake bread for Egyptian pyramid builders, and operate a trebuchet, among other skills once necessary for a precarious survival in different eras at different points on the globe. Also: tanning and trepanning.

And this sphinx not only poses riddles it tries its best to answer them, through the discipline of experimental archaeology. Which, if you (like me) have never heard of this field, you’re in for a series of fascinating discoveries, from a Turkish city where one’s relatives where buried beneath one’s bed to the unusual height of Chinese eunuchs.