by Laurie Sheck

1.

In her 1925 essay, On Being Ill, written when she was 42 years old, Virginia Woolf speaks of the spiritual change that illness often brings, how it can lead one into areas of extremity, wonder, isolation. “How astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undisclosed countries that are then disclosed, what wastes and deserts of the soul….”

The body is no longer a site of comfort and familiarity but “this monster…this miracle.” Overwhelming, weird, intense, mysterious. And with this sense of estrangement from one’s familiar, healthy self, there often comes a profound isolation that colors the whole world, “Human beings do not go hand in hand the whole stretch of the way. There is a virgin forest in each; a snowfield where even the print of birds’ feet is unknown.” It is a stark and desolate image. A cold whiteness without the barest trace of interruption. It is a world stripped to its core.

In illness “we cease to be soldiers in the army of the upright; we become deserters.”

Daily life becomes a strange, exotic place. Longed for, various, remote. The unreachable land of ordinary habits, activities, frustrations, pleasures.

2.

Particularly since the pandemic, I have thought often of Woolf’s essay, and of Elaine Scarry’s seminal work, The Body in Pain, where she writes of the way “physical pain has no voice.” “Whatever pain achieves, it achieves in part through its unsharability.” This opacity to others outside oneself is a significant part of its cruelty. This applies, too, to the often relative invisibility of certain maladies, like Long Covid. And in that gulf between appearance and reality, between the self and others, a terrible knowledge arises. “One aspect of great pain…is that it is to the individual experiencing it overwhelmingly present, more emphatically real than any other human experience, and yet is almost invisible to anyone else, unfelt, unknown.” What Scarry writes about pain can also apply to many other aspects of bodily unwellness.

She compares the experience to a human being “making a sound that cannot be heard.” Read more »

by Richard Farr

If you’re not from the US or the UK, you probably think that the recent dispute over the Chagos Islands is a below-the-fold story of no interested to you; perhaps, with less excuse, you think that even if you are from the US or the UK. In either case you’d be wrong. Never mind whether you can find the Chagos Islands on a map. They are very very interesting indeed — partly because what’s most interesting about them is not what the world’s press can be bothered to write about.

A string of pearls in the central Indian Ocean, the archipelago lies almost exactly halfway between Tanzania and Sumatra. It has been under British control since the defeat of Napoleon; since 1971, it includes the strategically vital joint US/UK military base on the largest island, Diego Garcia. Because of its shape and role, Diego Garcia is referred to by the US Navy, in an eruption of patriotic sentiment, as “the footprint of freedom.” 

The story currently being reported about Chagos is as follows. After an embarrassing string of national and international court defeats, the government of the UK — in close consultation with the first Trump Administration — agreed that it was best to cede control of the archipelago to the government of Mauritius, while retaining a multi-generational lease on Diego Garcia itself. But in the new context of Trump’s Greenland fantasies, this voluntary relinquishment of sovereign territory “FOR NO REASON WHATSOEVER” suddenly has a bad look. In language clearly showing that he literally had no idea of his previous administration’s consent to the deal, Trump has announced that it is (applying two of his favorite unintended ironies) “weak” and “stupid.” 

Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage, after being vouchsafed royal audiences with Speaker of the House Mike Johnson and US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessant respectively, have swallowed the bait with enthusiasm. As I write, Keir Starmer is doing what he does best: backing down, then not backing down, then furiously flailing and dithering, the splintery top edge of the world’s fence wedged firmly between his buttocks.

The question before us is therefore supposed to be this: are Trumpeters on both sides of the pond right that Starmer is weakly and stupidly “surrendering” British territory? Or were both governments previously correct that the new agreement was in their long-term strategic interest? Wisdom or weakness?

And then there are the facts. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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by W. Alex Foxworthy

The Paradox

The universe is dying. The second law of thermodynamics tells us that entropy—disorder, randomness, the dispersal of energy—increases inexorably over time. Every star that burns, every thought that fires, every act of creation contributes to the long slide toward heat death: a future of maximum entropy where nothing happens because nothing can happen. The gradients that permit work have been spent. The universe reaches equilibrium and stays there, forever.

Astronomers can see this future written faintly in the sky: the cosmic background radiation cooling by a fraction of a degree every billion years, galaxies drifting apart as dark energy stretches the fabric of space. The arrow points one way. It does not bend.

And yet.

In the midst of this cosmic unwinding, complexity keeps emerging. Galaxies condense from primordial hydrogen. Stars ignite and forge heavy elements in their cores. Planets form, chemistry becomes biology, and biology eventually produces brains—three-pound prediction engines capable of modeling the universe that made them, including modeling their own inevitable dissolution within it.

In 1944, the physicist Erwin Schrödinger posed this puzzle in What Is Life? How do living systems maintain their exquisite organization while the universe trends toward disorder? His answer pointed toward something he called “negentropy”—the ability of organisms to feed on order, importing low-entropy energy and exporting high-entropy waste. Life doesn’t violate thermodynamics; it surfs the gradient.

But Schrödinger’s insight leaves the deeper question untouched: Why does any of this feel like anything? How do we reconcile the arrow of entropy with the emergence not just of complexity, but of mind—of experience, of caring, of mattering? This is not merely a puzzle for physics. It touches on the deepest questions we can ask: What are we? Why does anything feel like anything? And does it matter that we exist at all? Read more »

by Derek Neal

Three weeks later and I’m almost fully healed. My ribs still hurt when I lie down to sleep and when I rise in the morning, but sitting and walking are fine. In another week I’ll be able to return to the gym and attempt some light weightlifting, a welcome resumption of my weekly routine. There was, however, a silver lining to my accident. In the days immediately following it, I could do little else but read. Sitting down in a chair, I was stuck there. So it was that I took A River Runs Through It (1976) by Norman Maclean off the bookshelf in my father’s office and began to turn its pages.

At one time, I’d referred to this book as “my favorite,” but that had been over 10 years ago, and since I no longer owned a copy, I’d forgotten why the book had made such an impression on me. I would soon remember, sitting in the chair and reading the 100-page autobiographical novella over a period of two or three sittings, interspersed with short breaks for more Advil and Tylenol, and to return the ice pack around my side to the freezer. The snow was falling softly on the other side of the large windows in the office, the same snow that I’d been cutting through the day before, turning this way and that on my skis, marveling at my own ability after not having been on the mountain for many years. It really is just like riding a bike, I thought to myself.

Maclean’s book is about the physical, too, about how the body can transcend itself through movement, and it seemed somehow appropriate that I would be reading it in my incapacitated state, allowing me to live vicariously through the two brothers in the story, both excellent fly fishers. The story, in fact, simply consists of a few set pieces built around fly fishing in Montana: the author fishing the “Big Blackfoot” river with his brother, Paul; their fishing the Elkhorn and the Blackfoot with the author’s brother-in-law; a final fishing trip with their father.

These fishing excursions allow Maclean to philosophize about life and to convince us that fly fishing is a spiritual act and the highest end a to which a person can aspire. Read more »

Allan Rohan Crite. Sometimes I’m Up, Sometimes I’m Down. Illustration for Three Spirituals from Earth to Heaven (Cambridge, Mass., 1948),” 1937. 

(Photographs of framed prints by Sughra Raza).

More here and here.

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by Malcolm Murray

Moltbook, the social network for AIs that launched only last week and already has more than a million AI agents, is a clear example of how little we can foresee of the risks that will arise when autonomous AI agents interact. In the first week, the AIs on Moltbook have both already founded their own religion and voiced their need for private communication that humans can’t snoop on. Scott Alexander has a post with many more interesting examples.

This is a clear example of how little we can foresee how AI will be implemented, as well as just plainly independently evolve, as we insert millions, billions or trillions of new intelligences into the societal infrastructure.

The key word describing AI evolution in 2025 was “jaggedness”. While LLM agents had superhuman capabilities in math, coding and science, they still lagged far behind humans in other areas, such as loading the dishwasher or buying something online. LLMs can reach gold-level performance on the International Math Olympiad, but also continue to make simple mistakes showing the forgetfulness and inconsistency of a 5-year old human child. They are on their way to becoming geniuses in a data center, but at this point, they are geniuses of the type that mistake their wife for their hat.

This jagged nature of frontier AI seems as it is a pattern we are stuck with in the current paradigm. Even as models progress, there is no expectation that their performance would suddenly become more uniform. This is perhaps not surprising – there is no general law of intelligence that suggests that intelligence should be uniformly applied. It is not the case with humans or animals, so why would it be the case for machine intelligence? Read more »

Snow Mountain

The place is cool and distant,
the air is clear of error,
the vista wide and brimming.

Everything is still,
undone.

Jim Culleny, 1974

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by Eric Feigenbaum

“This hospital makes mine look filthy,” the nurse manager from Sacramento said to me as we walked the halls of Tan Tock Seng Hospital.

This wasn’t a surprising first reaction to a Singaporean hospital. What Nancy said later surprised me more.

“I’m not sure about whether these nurses can handle working in an American ICU – their setup is so much better than ours,” Nancy told me. “These nurses are each taking care of one patient. And each patient is in a room with a complete set of state-of-the-art equipment. You would never find this in an American hospital, I’m sorry to say. I wish we had care quality like this. But I don’t know how nurses used to focusing entirely on one critical patient will do when they have to take care of two – and in some hospitals, even three patients using shared equipment coming down the hall on crash carts.”

At that time – 2004 to 2006 – I worked recruiting foreign nurses for US hospitals. Often, nurse managers would conduct video interviews, but on those occasions when we could talk hospitals into sending their interviewers to Singapore, the results were always better. Of course, the prelude to live interviews was helping the nurse managers understand the nurses’ work environments – which in turn gave them key information about things like skills, practice and language ability.

For several hours, we had toured the Johns Hopkins facility in Singapore – at that time located within National University Hospital – NUH itself and then Tan Tock Seng. At every step, Nancy and her colleague Gloria were amazed by facilities. Not only was the quality of care undeniable, but the nurses they spoke with were erudite and intelligent. Read more »

by Cannon Schmitt, guest columnist

“Everyone in my program is queer, neurodivergent, or both.” A soft ding interrupted the conversation, the elevator doors slid open, and we stepped out into a hallway full of people wearing name tags and carrying identical tote bags. I can’t remember anything about “Texts Under Pressure,” the panel we were on our way to see. But the overheard remark from one English lit doctoral student to another stuck because it reminded me of vampires, and of the value of the humanities

Vampires first. They are misfits. In this and nearly every other way—the crosses and the garlic, the stake through the heart, the homoeroticism barely concealed beneath the overblown heteroeroticism—Bram Stoker’s Dracula set the pattern.

Whatever else may be said about Count Dracula, the main thing is that he doesn’t belong. Why should the Ur-vampire be an Eastern European in London, speaking nearly fluent but accented English, or an aristocrat negotiating a middle-class world? Why should vampiric immortality register, not as the triumphant conquest of death, but as a curse that forces you to live on until you find yourself stranded somewhen unrecognizable, alone of your kind? Then there’s the blood. As vegans and the gluten-free can testify, special dietary requirements turn you into a curiosity, the person who gets a sad little labelled side plate at gatherings, a monumental bother even if politeness demands pretending otherwise.

Most fiction tells the story of an outsider—that’s what makes the novel the genre of modernity. But Dracula stands out by giving us a displaced, maladjusted title character with whom it’s impossible to empathize. Think Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, or Jane Eyre but with Anna, Emma, or Jane spending most of her time offstage, her inner world out of reach, her motivations opaque. Stoker pieces his plot together from diary entries, letters, telegrams, newspaper clippings, even excerpts from a ship’s log. Everyone involved in hunting down the vampire, regardless of how minor or peripheral, has their say. But the voice of the vampire himself is almost absent. Read more »

Rocky cliff with a dusting of snow (and more snow falling) in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol. Part of the winter Olympics will be in South Tyrol, starting next week, so this is good.

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by Rafaël Newman

One hundred and sixty years ago this month, in a national referendum held on January 14, 1866, Jews were given the official right to reside throughout Switzerland. Jewish people, whether of foreign provenance or Swiss-born and already living on Swiss territory, had been explicitly forbidden to establish residency in Switzerland in its constitution of 1848, the year modern Switzerland was founded. Since the Middle Ages, when they were re-admitted following the pogroms and expulsions of the 14th century, such permanent domicile as was permitted to Jews among the Swiss had been confined to the two villages of Endingen and Lengnau, in the canton of Argovia. It was only under economic pressure from its main trading partners, the US and France, which threatened the young state with punitive tariffs, that Switzerland—in the form of contemporary Swiss suffrage: in other words, exclusively Christian men—agreed to make the change. Even so, rates of approval in 1866 were drastically unequal across the country, with 93.9% of voters in the populous canton of Zurich favoring Jewish residency, and the tiny, remote half-canton of Appenzell Innerrhoden, which would continue to deny women, whether Christian or otherwise, the right to vote until the late 20th century, rejecting the measure by 98%.

Seventy-five years later, with World War encroaching on its frontiers, the Swiss establishment saw this enforced tolerance tested anew, as Jews fled the Third Reich for asylum within Switzerland’s neutral borders. Although they accepted some of these refugees, Swiss officials notoriously sent many back, their passports marked with a “J”, and placed restrictions on the professional and political activities of those they did admit (such as the poet and philosopher Margarete Susman, on whom see here and here), both to protect “native” Swiss from competition, and to avoid provoking the Nazi authorities, with whom clandestine relations were being maintained.

Nevertheless, in January 1941, a group of Jewish residents in Zurich, several foreign-born, was able to join the musician Marko Rothmüller in founding Omanut, an association for the promotion of Jewish art. The Swiss organization was created in memory of the original Omanut, which Rothmüller, a Yugoslav immigrant, had founded in 1935 in Zagreb, but which had since vanished under the Nazi occupation of Croatia. Read more »

by Charles Siegel

Sun went down in honey
And the moon came up in wine
You know the stars were spinning dizzy
Lord the band kept us so busy
We forgot about the time

That is a verse from “The Music Never Stopped,” a song written by Bob Weir and John Barlow, and recorded on the Grateful Dead’s 1975 album “Blues for Allah.” Weir, the rhythm guitarist and one of the two principal composers for the band, died earlier this month at 78. His obituary appeared in the New York Times and everywhere else. I can add nothing to all the tributes and encomia, or the descriptions of his life and music. But one aspect of his career that seems to have gotten little attention is fascinating to me: he may very well have played before more people than any other musician ever.

I do not remotely qualify as a Deadhead. I saw the Grateful Dead seven times, albeit in seven different cities. I’ve seen Dead and Company, the most recent successor band, a few times, including last year at the Sphere in Las Vegas.

But I’ve been listening to their music for most of my life. I had some of their albums, though by no means all of them, and I had a few other albums on which one or more of the members played. I wore out “Old and In the Way,” for example, a great collaboration between Jerry Garcia and some bluegrass masters, during college. In law school I wore out the live album “Dead Set.” So while there are legions of people, some of whom are good friends, who saw the band many more times, I have spent a fair amount of time listening to and thinking about them. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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