by Eric Schenck

Over  the last 10 years, I’ve learned three languages. Egyptian Arabic, German, and Spanish. And the best thing I’ve done for each one? Meet with quality conversation partners so I can practice speaking. 

It’s a simple but effective habit:

• Find someone that speaks your target language
• Make sure they want to learn a language you speak
• Meet with them and “exchange” languages so you can get some quality speaking practice

This can be a mixed bag. I’ve had dozens of conversation partners over the years. Most are just OK. But some are actually great. 

Here are five of my most memorable partners from the last decade: 

Egyptian Arabic

Mohamed:

I met Mohamed when I first moved to Cairo in 2015. I was working as an English teacher, and he was one of the students at my school. 

We became friends fast. Mohamed and I would meet up every other weekend, smoking shisha while learning new vocab. It was a lot of fun.

But it wasn’t all great. He was raised in a conservative society, and some of the things he said left me shaking my head. I got better at Egyptian Arabic, sure. But even more valuable? The experience I had spending time immersed in a different culture. (And at least trying to see things from somebody else’s perspective.) Read more »

by Peter Topolewski

“Wilcox married a police officer who worked crime scenes. He gave her advice on how to protect herself from an attacker: She should always carry keys in her hand when she walked to her car alone, and she shouldn’t keep a block of knives exposed in the kitchen. Too often, her husband told her, he’d seen women murdered with their own knives.”

Wilcox is Dawn Wilcox, a school nurse in Plano, Texas. The quote comes from 14,445 and Counting, a story about her and several other people—women—who document victims of murder. Specifically, victims of femicide, the murder of females because they are female. The article by Christa Hillstrom appears in The Atavist Magazine. It is a grim snapshot of the world women live and die in circa 2026.

After a friend of Wilcox’s daughter was murdered by an acquaintance, Wilcox “thought about how often women were harmed by men they knew…Did women have no choice,” she wondered, “but to wander the world hoping never to step on a landmine of a man?” Looking for further details about the number of murdered women, and who they were, she found no comprehensive database. What data existed was “grossly incomplete”. Wilcox began to build one herself in 2016. Her focus was the victims.

Wilcox maintains Women Count USA right up to today. It contains the names of 14,445 women—thus the title of the article. The real world has created a backlog of entries, ballooned by Wilcox’s refusal to automate the process, by her insistence of manually entering each name. Because, she says, “tracking femicides became another way of providing care”. Not the same as, but similar to, her work as a nurse. Read more »

by Anton Cebalo

The film The Matrix famously froze its simulation in the year 1999. It was chosen as the alleged peak of human civilization. What unknowns might the new millennium bring? Many were understandably anxious. It was a psychologically-heavy turning point.

But celebrations abounded. ABC News ran a special program that covered the new millennium festivities around the world. A global consortium was formed to commemorate the occasion. 2000 Today was made up of a diverse set of national channels from Venezuela to Egypt to Poland. It even had its own soundtrack titled “A World Symphony for the New Millennium.” There had never been before such a successful effort to create a globalized world through media, with the exception of maybe the song “We Are the World” in 1985.

Three world powers—the United States, Russia, and China—each took a very different tone in addressing the momentous occasion.

For the United States, the new year was spoken of as if sitting atop the highest peak and gratitude from Americans was expected. At his 2000 State of the Union Address, President Bill Clinton tried to keep this optimism going with little room for acknowledging past tragedy. His opening statement was blunt in stating: “We are fortunate to be alive at this moment in history.” Never before had America enjoyed “so much prosperity and social progress with so little internal crisis and so few external threats.”

Russia, however, had an altogether different experience of  the new millennium, one of shocking dysfunction. Read more »

by TJ Price

I

For years after an abrupt departure from college, I floated around, aimless and pathless. It was only a matter of time before I lost any buoyancy and began to drown, most likely in one or any of the bars I had begun to frequent. Seasons slid by without any notice, as if each month were just a mask slipping off by the coy legerdemain of a stage magician. Winter led to another winter; summer led to another summer. How we got from one to the another was the topic of much surly amazement from the drunks with whom I kept company; often I would bear witness to their surprise—and their gall—upon realizing how much time had passed.

There was always a reason to drink, but there was never a reason to stop, other than a vague intimation of estimated excess. Maybe a pang in the liver, or a tightening below the sternum. A nose turned slightly bulbous, blushing with broken capillaries. Maybe a heart so full of booze that it sloshed around each chamber, flooding it like rooms in a house. 

I spent most of my time with this girl I knew, this girl who spent more time in the bar than she did in her expensive condominium. We’d hit it off almost immediately, bonding over our shared love of reading. Not that we had a lot of books in common—our tastes were wildly divergent—but it was more that we both just liked to read that drew us together. The first night we met, during a late-night excursion from our barstools, she took me to her place and I discovered that her fridge was stuffed full of pizza boxes and takeout containers. The stove didn’t work, she explained, but I knew she was bluffing—it would have been simple to get it fixed, even if it were actually broken.

That night, after a few lines of cocaine, we talked excitedly about poetry: she recited a line or two of Plath—you do not do, you do not do, black shoe, in which I have lived for years like a foot, barely daring to breathe or ha-choo—I returned my own salvo, with Eliot—and through the spaces of the dark, midnight shakes the memory, as a madman shakes a dead geranium. She pressed a finger alongside one nostril, sniffed loudly, and then stared at me with her big round moon eyes, impatience growing on her like a fungus. I was meant to do something, I think, but in that moment of booze and drug-fueled confusion, I couldn’t parse what was expected of me. Read more »

by Carol A Westbrook

When did you first notice that you cell phone was finishing your sentences? Sure, spellcheck had been around for a while, however annoying it might be, but coming up with whole sentences that seemed to read your mind—“can I call you later?” “Can we meet tomorrow?” “Do you need groceries?  These suggestions seem to come out of nowhere but can surprisingly express exactly what you want to say.

But so-called artificial intelligence struck like lightening in November 2022 when a start-up company called Open AI was founded with a billion dollars from an assortment of Silicon Valley techies who released a chatbot called Chat GPT.  Within 5 days a million people had chatted with the bot, generating essays, poems, and answers to questions, if not always perfectly accurate.  Two months later, Chat GPT had 100 million users.

Chat GPT is available to everyone online for free, like Wikipedia.  However, for an extra monthly cost of about $20, you can obtain the Premium version, which gives you faster results, more access, and rapid application of new updates.  AI is expensive to run, however.  It requires large data centers, occupying acres of land, to process the data and analyze the problems it is given; large amounts of water are needed to cool these massive computers; and finally, large amounts of data, printed matter, poetry, computer programs, and so on must be constantly fed into the data banks in order to keep up with current events and new discoveries. Microsoft has been a major supporter of Open AI, providing critical cloud computing infrastructure via Microsoft Azure, enabling the training of large models, and investing millions in the company. Read more »

by Tammy Lai-Ming Ho

Maybe in the many nearby ghost towns,
ghosts do roam
and send old-fashioned good wishes
to abstract relatives in distant homes.

—from the poem “Maybe”, If I Do Not Reply (2024)

*

In Zhou Dedong’s short story “Have You Heard of ‘Ancient Glory’?” (Hereafter “Ancient Glory”),[1] a young couple scrapes together a down payment on a new apartment in the western outskirts of a Chinese city, the only place they can afford. The complex, Ancient Glory, looks impeccable: freshly rendered concrete, manicured paths, functioning lifts. It is also dead quiet. No lights in the windows. No footsteps echo in the corridors. The couple sense something strange hanging over the place. Then Qingming Festival arrives, and people start showing up. Qingming, falling in spring, is a day when families visit graves or memorial sites to clean them, burn paper offerings, and honour the dead—an act of filial piety, the deep reverence for one’s elders and forebears that sits at the heart of Chinese moral life. The apartments in Ancient Glory hold funeral urns. The buildings are occupied. Just not by the living.

Zhou Dedong, often called the godfather of suspense fiction in China, published this story in Sinophagia: A Celebration of Chinese Horror (2024), the first English-language anthology of contemporary Chinese horror fiction. He meant “Ancient Glory” as a ghost story. But in a strange way, it is also a documentary.

A cemetery plot in Beijing’s unhinged property market can now cost 60,000 RMB per square metre (about US$8,000), sometimes more, which is several times what one would pay for a home in nearby Hebei Province. A burial plot comes up for renewal every twenty years, while an apartment deed runs for seventy. The calculation is clear and brutal: a flat is simply better value for the dead. Families have begun purchasing apartments in struggling developments to house cremated remains, giving rise to what scholars have termed guhui fang, bone ash apartments.[2] The ghost city and the columbarium have become, in contemporary China, the same building. Read more »

by Thomas Fernandes

Last time, we explored how insects navigate and hunt using motion-based vision, and how these perceptual interfaces can themselves be exploited by dragonflies using motion camouflage to trick conspecifics.

In this essay, we shift from insects to spiders, and from motion cues to the many sensory strategies spiders use to sense their environment and guide their behavior. These developments culminate in the Portia spider, which has evolved one of the most remarkable visual systems known, along with cognitive abilities to match it. Harland and Jackson assembled three representative hunting scenarios involving Portia, drawn from repeated observations, which I will use as illustrative examples during the essay, while we try to understand their perceptual space.

Spiders are an unlikely place to look for visual sophistication. The first spiders evolved more than 300 million years ago, long before flying insects. Web-building spiders, which dominated early spider evolution, rely only minimally on vision. Instead, they externalize perception into silk. The web is not just a trap; it is an extended sensory organ. Web-dwelling spiders using aerial structures developed about 150 million years ago targeting flying insects.

In web-dwelling spiders, vibration replaces vision as the primary channel of information. Abiotic sources such as wind tend to displace large portions of the web at once in low frequency. Biotic sources like struggling prey, potential mates, invading conspecifics or even predators, originate from specific locations usually at higher frequencies.

The web transmits and amplifies all signals generated, while the spider “listens” with its legs, reconstructing a three-dimensional map of tension and displacement. It senses these displacements using slit sensilla, specialized strain sensors located at the joints of its eight legs, capable of detecting movements as small as 0.1 μm. Read more »

Remnants of a celebration on the streets of Brixen, South Tyrol.

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by Steve Szilagyi

It’s been many decades since I worked as a restaurant dishwasher. The best part of the job was the camaraderie of the kitchen—the japes, the clash of pans, and the friendly female server who’d stop back to chat during slack times. The worst part was wiping uneaten food off plates with my bare hands into a dirty garbage can by the sink. I had a keen social conscience at the time, and it was depressing to send one half-eaten or barely touched delicacy after another into the moist abyss with my bare palm (no rubber gloves in those days), while elsewhere my favorite rock stars were raising money to feed the starving in Bangladesh. Once I’d cleared the plates of food, I’d spray them with a hose and place them into the rack of the dishwashing machine. Once the rack was full, I’d close the hood, press a button or something, and wait a couple of minutes while the machine soaped and rinsed the dishes at the requisite 140-180 degree temperature. Then I’d lift the hood, let the steaming dishes dry for a few seconds, then pile them on the shelf. The pots and pans I did by hand over the sink.

The human dishwasher is the lowest person in the restaurant kitchen hierarchy. (I was demoted to the position from busboy after an unfortunate incident involving a tray of hot soups and a customer’s lap.) But it’s not a disgraceful position. The dish-doer in a restaurant has a certain solitary dignity, supported by the essential nature of his or her task. In the home, however, dishwashing can be a surprisingly emotional flashpoint. It’s not for nothing the British domestic dramas of personal and social resentment were labeled the kitchen sink school.

While there are many volatile issues involved, the main points of contention are who does the dishes; when they get done; and who notices they need doing. What’s at stake isn’t the difficulty of the task, it’s the implied low status of whoever does it.

Really, since the invention of modern plumbing, dishwashing is probably the least difficult of regularly performed domestic tasks. Compare it to making beds, mopping floors, or changing the cat box. Washing dishes is no more physically demanding than washing your hands. Most kitchens have a window over the sink. You can contemplate the view, slap on a pair of headphones, and listen to podcasts while you wash.

Yet dirty dishes still trigger sulks, accusations, and grim domestic reckonings. Perhaps because the argument occurs in the kitchen – the emotional center of the house – where resentments hum like an old Kelvinator. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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by Paul Braterman

Study this book if you are at all interested in the threats to the scientific and rational underpinnings of our culture, in the US and to some extent elsewhere. It is not an easy read, because of the density of material that the authors assembled to make their case, and the wide-ranging phenomena that they survey, but this is unavoidable given the depth of our predicament. Science, and indeed any sense of reality, is increasingly under threat from governments and the oligarchs who control them. Such a level of disdain for truth, and irresponsible indifference to the consequences of this disdain, once seemed an absurd nightmare, but is now our everyday reality. Since the book was written, growing US government interference with science, and the collusion of a press increasingly controlled by a handful of oligarchs, must add to the force of the authors’ warnings. The book itself, incidentally, it is excellent value at $35/£20 for a 350-page hardback.

Some examples of what would have seen impossible a mere decade ago. Vaccine refusal based on ignorance and ideology is estimated to have caused at least 230,000 unnecessary Covid-related deaths in the US. (For comparison, the total US military death toll in all foreign wars since World War II, including Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and both Gulf Wars, was slightly less than 90,000). The US Department of Energy secretly commissioned a report from the denialist fringe of climate science (two of whose members I have written about earlier), and then attempted to conceal their working documents. As I write, the future shape and funding of agencies such as NOAA, NSF, and NASA is in doubt. And two days after the blocking of the Straits of Hormuz, the US Interior Department announced that it was paying almost $1 billion to the French company, TotalEnergies, to not proceed with planned wind and solar generation. All this in the nation that has been (had been?) the world’s leader in science for more than 80 years.

As this book explains in great detail, such things do not happen by themselves. In 270 pages of main text, and 60 pages of notes, including 800 references, the authors give us their perspective on these phenomena. And a very well-informed perspective it is. Read more »

by Bill Murray

International order in the twentieth century was set by empires, then blocs engaged in ideological struggle, and finally by alliances based on common ideological and financial interests. Now even those alliances are dissolving. The Iran episode is the unmistakable break, and the United States is the agent of that break.

For most of the twentieth century, the world was organized not just among sovereign states, but also by hierarchy. First, powerful empires governed weaker colonies. Then two powerful Cold War superpowers rode herd over their less powerful allies.

Post-Cold War alliances also required a dominant member, and in the West it was the United States. Now, even the post-Cold War system is breaking down before our eyes. The eighty-year post-World War II order looks unlikely to survive abandonment by its architect.

The last day of February, 2026 could be remembered by history as the day the incredible shrinking of respect, regard, and trust for the United States crossed a terrible threshold, under the leadership of a president clearly in over his head.

Until that day, when ill winds had whistled through the rules-based international order, the timbers may have creaked, but the structure stood strong. On February 28th the Western alliance, on life-support since 2016 through well-meant efforts of various world figures, just may have died along with the ayatollah.

Let’s look at how Washington’s attack on Tehran hastens a much larger unraveling of the Western system that World War II built, and sends us all into uncharted territory. Read more »

by Dilip D’Souza

Here’s a factoid that, over a century later, still stuns: In 1914, the mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan published an academic paper in which he spelled out 17 – yes, seventeen – formulas to calculate π (pi). 

This is remarkable on many levels. Most of us run into π in school, via an approximation. That’s usually 3.14, or 22/7. We learn that it is the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter, and those approximations are usually close enough to the actual value of π for most purposes we might encounter in school. At some point we might even have come across Aryabhata’s approximation:

Add 4 to 100, he said, and multiply the result by 8. Add 62,000. Divide the result by 20000. The answer, he said, approaches the ratio between the circumference and diameter of a circle. [My free and easy translation of his words.]

And that answer is 3.1416, which is π accurate to four decimal places. Which is π good enough for most calculations most of us would attempt. After all, it differs from π by about 0.0002 percent, which percentage by itself is hard to comprehend – though the word “approaches” fits well.

Now if you are interested in precision engineering, or in travelling into space, you will want more decimal places. 15 is the number NASA used in its calculations for the Voyager I mission it launched in 1977. That intrepid spacecraft is now sailing through interstellar space about 26 billion km from the Earth, so it’s safe to say the 15 digit calculations have served it, and NASA, well.

More recently – well, as I write this! – Artemis 2 is on its way to the Moon carrying four astronauts. Its path to our satellite is a tribute to careful, intricate calculations. I say that because there is really no sense in which the four astronauts in that spacecraft are piloting their voyage to the Moon. Instead, they are following a precisely-determined path. π was certainly part of that determination – so if the value used was accurate to four decimal places, would that have been enough? Read more »

Sughra Raza. Fungal Abstractions. March 2022, Vermont.

Digital photograph.

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by W. Alex Foxworthy

We are trying to build artificial intelligence systems that share our human values. Yet we cannot agree – across worldviews and cultures – on what those values are, or why they matter. The alignment problem is a reflection of something broken in us – we lack a shared rational account of what matters and why.

The old organizing stories – religious narratives about why we are here, what we owe each other, and where we’re headed – have proven tenuous in the face of all we have learned since they were formulated. Science has dramatically deepened our understanding and capabilities. But it has offered no account of what we’re here for. Secular humanism has tried to answer this question and has produced something intellectually respectable but for most people emotionally thin – principles that do not hold communities together during crisis or give people a sense of deep purpose and belonging. The consequences of the breakdown of these shared frameworks are visible everywhere: in epidemic depression and anxiety, in addiction and rising suicide rates, in deepening political divides, and in conspiracy thinking. I believe these flourish not because people are stupid but because they’re desperate for a story that makes sense of their purpose, their lives, and their place in the grand scheme of things.

This essay is a beginning – an attempt to lay a rational foundation for shared meaning among humans and the intelligences we’re building. Read more »

by David J. Lobina

The role of failure is an underappreciated issue in professional sports – and a brutal reality for most sportspeople in general, in fact, professional or otherwise. I myself play tennis regularly, and I find that I often lose my matches even when I play well. It is rather disheartening, but the fact that I don’t play badly in these losses – and, well, that I typically enjoy playing anyway – makes it worthwhile to continue, though it can take a toll sometimes.

And the situation is all the more dramatic for professional tennis players; indeed, it is hard not to notice that many tennis pros lose more matches than they win, and the toll must be huge (there are expenses to cover, ranking points to covet, and a living to make; this book in particular is an enlightening and fascinating account from a player who did not quite make it, but still play some big matches).

This here is the current ranking of the top 100 male professional players according to their win/loss index. The very top players (2/3) rarely lose; the players below and up to the top 30 win more matches than they lose; the players below the top 30 win a bit more than they lose (but in some cases barely above a 50% success rate); and then from the top 50 downwards the success rate starts at 50% and quickly goes down (the current number 100 has a 6-14 record). And this is only in terms of match win/loss ratios; the vast majority of professional players have not won a tournament this year (this is true of 3 players from the current top 10 right now), and winning tournaments is the most coveted outcome in professional tennis.

But as mentioned, you can play well in a tennis match and still lose, which introduces a different family of failures altogether; in particular, the rate at which players actually lose points in a match. The final match at the 2025 Roland Garros between the top 2 male players at the time is a good example. A total of 385 points were played on the day, with each player winning 50% of points (192 for the winner, 193 for the loser), and this suggests that the match was won (or lost) at very specific junctures – one player managed to win some of the most important points here and there (break point up, set point up, etc.). Read more »

Lucky Again

Yesterday today
might never have come but
I’m lucky again

It did and here you are
my bulwark against
a lone sea.

In the garden you began
years ago in our plot of sand
where little grew but wild
strawberries close to the ground,
their tendrils groping dry earth,
we now have hibiscus with blossoms
the size of dinner plates, and day lilies
in colors of all things that make death an illusion.

For years under your baton
we’ve sown our sand with
death’s stuff—

mown grass,
…dry leaves,
……. the remnants of meals,
………….. manure of nearby farms,
……………… until what was dry is lush,
…………………. was empty is full,
………………………. was barren is flush.

Today tomorrow
may never come but here
you are and I am
………………………. lucky again.

by Jim Culleny; August 29, 2009

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by Richard Farr

I’m on a trip to London and Spain. In Trafalgar Square with a spare half hour, I plunge into the National Gallery because I want to see the Arnolfini portrait again. Alas, van Eyck’s cadaverous old merchant and his heavily pregnant (or not pregnant) young wife (or betrothed, or recently dead ex-wife — pick you theory) are being attacked by a hundred-strong mob. I can’t even get close enough to see the annoying little dog, never mind the details.

But my consolation prize waits nearby, all but ignored: a lovely double portrait by Robert Campin from about 1435. Also, Rogier van der Weyden’s Mary Magdalene Enjoying Her Morning Latte.

I’ve never seen a painting by either Campin or van der Weyden of which I didn’t think “this deserves to be better known.”

Days later I’m in València. Near the entrance to the Museo de Bellas Artes some anonymous genius from the fourteenth century has gifted us a brilliantly expressive carving of John the Evangelist. Those eyes; that exact position of the head and neck; that subtle tension in the right hand. I don’t know what to say. What I want to say “Thank you! Thank you! How did you do that?” 

Behind him there’s a grand gallery of altarpieces from the same era or a little later. Some are more than 20 feet high; they all look as if they were painted yesterday in a color-mad frenzy of devotion. I most harbor some inchoate prejudice about the late Medieval world because I’m amazed by the psychological acuity and wit and sheer individuality in the rendition of the faces.

The next day, wanting something Modern, I go to the Centre del Carme, which has an enormous show that might be called, though it isn’t, Margins of the Unendurable. Some thousand or so dimly-lit square meters are devoted to a well-known video artist. There are, the blurb explains: “nine large-scale installations conceived as immersive stage sets that envelop the viewer and prompt reflection on issues such as emigration, violence, identity, and philosophical concepts like eremitism and the infinite seriality of life.” 

I am not making this up. Read more »