November 6, 2025 : Wondercab Mini (100A)
THE BOOK TABLE
This week, rounding out our 100th fortnight, a survey of some recent books by friends of the Cabinet, all worthy of note and somehow seemingly engaged in a common tumbling and rolling discourse amongst themselves.
For starters, a sprawling and never less than profoundly engaging theory of just about everything from our dear friend, the Google tech and digital innovator and polyvalent visionary Blaise Agüera Arcas. Some of you may recall how we profiled Blaise (by way of an extended interview in the context of the publication of his AI novella Ubi Sunt) in issues 17, 18 and 19 and then linked to a videotape of Ren’s subsequent conversation with Blaise at LA’s Hammer Museum in Issue 34A. This time out, Blaise responds to the ongoing controversy as to whether AI is or could ever be seen as self-conscious, let alone simply conscious, let alone intelligent, by expanding the question every which way, to begin with by asking “What is Life?” and showing how life, in deep evolutionary terms, is intelligence all the way down, intelligence understood as the sort of predictive computational intentionality that can already be seen in the unfurling behavior of one-celled creatures and even within one-celled creatures, rising through the tree of life (or perhaps the thicket of life would be a better metaphor) all the way up and out to the profusion of life ways we experience and ourselves embody today—and he is hard-pressed to see how such intelligence and indeed consciousness defined as such couldn’t someday be expressed in AI machine terms. Ren once asked Blaise whether he thought that an inordinate number of those working under him at Google were “on the spectrum,” to which Blaise replied, “We are all on the spectrum, Ren, that’s what a spectrum is.” And this book hazards an audacious tour d’horizon of the extended spectrum of all that is. There is grandeur in this view of life, even if one finds oneself demurring from time to time, and fresh fascination/provocation on every page.
Film and sound editor and all-round polymagus Walter Murch has been with the Cabinet from the very start, literally appearing in issue #1 (in Zoom conversation at the Venice Architectural Biennial, re golden sections) and then #5 on the deep structure of Egyptian pyramids, and Issue 20 by way of a letter on the human egg as the very center of the known universe; and more recently in issue 93, a compress of the chapter from his current book on the spliceosome (which is to say the way in which each and every one of us has billions of filmlike editors whirring away inside ourselves at this and every moment); and 95 another previewed chapter from the current book on saccadic vision (how the fact that we are literally blind for a fraction of a second every time we move our eyeballs and what our brain does to disguise this fact from ourselves in turn accounts for the very possibility of cinema); and 95A on his famous editing of the Valkyries helicopter scene in Apocalypse Now and subsequently his deconstruction of same in Jarhead; on through #97 my recent conversation with him at the Hammer at the time of the book’s release, and 97A his famous sun-brain calculation… You get the idea. Suddenly Something Clicked takes off from where his slim masterpiece In the Blink of An Eye (a sort of zen and the art of film editing, prized by readers far beyond its original cinemaphilic audience) left off, constituting the octogenarian master’s memoir cum manual cum manifesto—and like Blaise’s book seems to well out in every direction (birth, Walter points out, is the first time that the gestating fetus, which has been able to hear since four-and-a-half months of age, gets to experience silence) and the endlessly widening wavelets of insight from both books keep seeming to lap into each other—amplifying and at times cancelling one another out.
Likewise with Michael Benson, who was profiled in 85 and had his latest offering, arguably his most astonishing yet, previewed in 85A. Filmmaker and curator Benson began his publishing career with a trio of coffee-table picture books (Beyond, Far Out, and Planetfall) which, with their accompanying exhibitions, explored the photographic legacy of space probes (mining the staggering and still largely untapped inventory of imagery hoovered up over the years by those probes and then earth-based telescopes as well for vantages that might be longterm aesthetically and not just shortterm scientifically compelling—mosaically configured land- and skyscapes of the sun, planets, and moons of planets within our own solar system and then galaxies and the universe beyond). Following Cosmographics, a history of Man’s attempts to visualize the universe from earliest times, and then Space Odyssey, a history of film director Stanley Kubrik’s own celebrated attempt to do the same, Benson has flipped the valences of his rampaging curiosity this time out with Nanocosmos, marshalling electron microscopes to survey the no-less sublime (and in fact maybe even more so) splendors of the infinitesimal. Beginning with breathtaking captures of the topography of literal specks of moondust, Benson widens out from there to survey the no less gobsmacking intricacies of radiolarians, diatoms, dinoflagellates, flower-ensconced micromites, the wings and eyes of insects in flight, on through the dazzlingly precise geometry of falling snowflakes (and how on earth did he capture those?). In addition, Benson provides wide-ranging and ever-lucid textual notes by way of introduction and afterword, on both the optics involved and the specifics of what those amazing optics evince from page to page. Whether or not you end up buying this book (and why on earth would you not?), do go sample its pages at your local bookstore (at which point you may well feel you have to). And just try looking at the world the same way ever again.
Physicist turned science writer Margaret Wertheim (and now doyenne over her own substack, Science Goddess) appeared in our own Issue 34 (weighing in on simultaneous synchronicity across the history of scientific insight) and in Issue 65 (speculating on Richard Feynman’s debt to kindergarten), among other places, and I include this particular book of hers, cowritten with her twin sister art critic and theorist Christine, even though it hails from a few years back, because it somehow seems to rhyme with the other more recent books I’m spotlighting here. Their crochet coral reef project has evolved over the past couple decades from an inspired, albeit fortuitous set of convergent associations: the fact that LA-based Margaret and her sister originally hailed from Queensland, Australia, and hence may have had a more urgent and immediate sense of the perils facing their beloved shoreline Great Barrier Reef; physicist Margaret’s earlier explorations of the history of the depiction of space, culminating in her inquiry into the remarkably vexed history of two centuries worth of pretty much exclusively male attempts to model what non-Euclidean space might in fact look like (landing several of the protagonists in question in mental institutions), climaxing in turn in Margaret’s interviews with Daina Taimina, the Cornell-based Latvian émigré mathematician who cracked the problem (“Well, that’s simple, all you have to do is…”) through crochet (!), producing objects that in turn bore an uncanny resemblance to the coral reefs in question (nature had been doing it all along); the twin’s resultant decision to crochet a tribute to the Reef as a way of calling attention to the dire perils facing these natural wonders—and then finally the way that decision in turn provoked a remarkable and endlessly compounding outpouring of fellow concern, with literally thousands of crocheters around the world chiming in with efforts of their own. It is no exaggeration to suggest that the crocheted coral reef has become the global warming equivalent of the AIDS Quilt: an incredibly vivid and lovely visualization of the crisis in its own right, and a powerfully engaging one at that, one that has spawned dozens of shows around the world, melding mathematics, evolutionary biology, feminist art practice, and ongoing cross-class eco-activist concern—all beautifully evoked in this summary volume.
We all met the effervescent topologist Chaim Goodman-Strauss, currently in residence at the National Museum of Mathematics in New York, back in our Issue 40A, where his participation in the team that cracked the legendary “Einstein” aperiodic tiling problem landed the four of them on the front page of the New York Times not once but twice in a single week. Before that, he, Hilda Burgel, and the fabled “Game of Life” progenitor John Conway (since deceased, alas, during the early days of Covid) had collaborated on a much-prized volume tracking, as its title signaled, The Symmetry of Things, a topic as endlessly beguiling as all that. Now Burgel and Goodman-Strauss are just out with “a Greatly Expanded, Much Abridged” version of the earlier masterwork, entitled The Magic Theorem. It turns out that technically speaking, there are seventeen different types of symmetry (who knew?) and this romp of a treatise (ideal for math nerds everywhere, see our own Issue 62) lays out the entire typology and theorizes its intricacies. And even for those who are not so nerdily inclined, the thing is filled to the gills with trippy mind-bending imagery.
Speaking of trippy mind-bendery, we have the latest from Justin Smith-Ruiu (previously Justin E.H. Smith, the author a while back of the spot-on The Internet is Not What You Think It Is which he followed up on, somewhat incongruously, by launching his own wildly heterodox and meta-varied Hinternet substack, one of our very favorites, just as he is one of our favorite philosophers, or rather ex-philosophers, or maybe trans-philosophers, or just plain natural-philosophers-of-the-olde-school). This time out we get Justin Smith-Ruiu On Drugs, a title veritably dripping with sly double-entendre (completely apt in both directions) for not only is he relating a recent bout of drug self-experimentation (one brought on far from recreationally but rather by way by a dizzying existential emergency, and hence re-foundational in an entirely different sense), but he is also taking the experience seriously and subjecting philosophy itself, or at any rate the canon of the past 400 years of the Western philosophy, to its lessons and implications. Ever since Descartes, if not before, Western philosophy has been premised on and steeped in sobriety, on clear-seeing and rigorous logic, on clarity and distinctness and their dictates, a tenor that runs clear through much of the analysis of mind and brain that in turn leads directly into and premises most current AI theorizing and practice. Which is to say a tenor that leaves out a whole other aspect of human being, one revealed in dreams perhaps but also in drug or alcohol inebriation. And what would it be like to take that aspect as seriously as the other? What sort of thing is the mind such that it reacts to drugs in such a way, and for that matter is a world that affords access to such reactions (in which context, a nice companion to Smith’s text would be Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Change Our Futures)? What would it be like to take hallucinations seriously (actual hallucinations of mind as opposed to the ersatz version rampant among AI bots, which are actually just mistakes, sometimes quite serious ones, under the veneer of some PR firm’s clever rechristening). And what to make of the fact, over and beyond all this, that Justin and Blaise are in fact dear friends, each with the highest regard for the other?
These last two are included not only for their own sakes but because they stand so deliciously at the polar opposite—or so Ren remains stubbornly convinced—of the sort of computationally-grounded intelligence envisioned as all-pervasive by Blaise at the outset of this thread. And thank god for that.
With The Grand Valley, Morgan Meis is back with another one of his topsy-turvy, loop-de-loop joyrides of an appreciation (this being the final volume of a triptych which began with one centered, sort of, on Rubens and his Drunken Silenus, and another that zoned in and out of Franz Marc’s vision of the Fate of the Animals across the First World War). This time Meis’s ostensible subject is Joan Mitchell (on whom he is very good), but Claude Monet, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Heloise and Abelard, Aeneas and Dido, Carl Jung and his Red Book, Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Lord Chandos, and Jean-Paul Riopelle and the Dog-Walker, among others, all get roped in to compoundingly delirious effect. Indeed, one gradually grows to realize that this thin volume is one long prose poem, and Meis is Mitchelling away, doing in thinking and writing—thrusting, daubing, skritching and scratching, keening, recanting, abreacting, disindividuating, becoming present and nothing else—exactly what he’s shown us Mitchell herself was doing with her great painting series. It’s all dazzling to watch, and in the end quite devastating.
“One morning in August 2024,” Rainey Knudson—instigator and editor emeritus of Glasstire, Texas’s premier online arts digest—tells us in the introduction to this exquisite new volume of hers, “an email arrived from the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, announcing its 100th anniversary. ‘Hm,’ I thought, ‘You know what would be fun . . .’ Thus was born The MFAH 100, a personal project that would be a love letter to my childhood museum. The idea came instantly: for 100 days, I would write 100 words each about 100 works from the museum’s collection on my blog The Impatient Reader.” And that is precisely what this newly released book version offers, though it’s hard to capture the wry, sly, wise, idiosyncratic, poignant, loopy, heart-rending, soul-gladdening sheer expansiveness of these fleet selections, short of just offering a few examples, so see here, here, and here. Sure, a wide-ranging computational intelligence informs the inventory of experience out of which this sublime array emerges, but there’s no way that computational intelligence alone could have achieved it. Machines will simply never rise to that pitch, precisely, of personal, embodied experience, let alone that gratuitous overflow of grace. Or so, damn it all, Ren persists in hoping.
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NOTE: For the early readers amongst you, Ren will be in livestream conversation with Justin Smith-Ruiu today, Thursday, at 8:30 pm Paris, (7:30 pm London, 2:30 pm EST, 11:30 am PST) around themes lunar and arcane, reachable via this link. For the rest of you, the event will eventually be posted and we will let you know where.
