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Kyle Paoletta and A.S. Hamrah at The Nation:

Hamrah’s most recent project was Last Week in End Times Cinema, a weekly newsletter collecting together “pathetic and ridiculous” news stories about the movie business. (True to form, Hamrah blasted these digests out from his EarthLink account rather than bothering with Substack.) Those columns are now available in a separate collection as well. There are dispiriting headlines like “Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey 2 Ending Explained” and summaries of news stories about Sam Altman, the “eyebrowless CEO of OpenAI,” suggesting “AI might figure out on its own how to stop itself from ending the human race.” Read enough of these missives and it becomes obvious why studio heads were too focused on replacing actors with algorithms to properly market a film like Train Dreams, filing it away in Netflix’s library of slop after a curtailed theatrical release.

Together, Algorithm of the Night and Last Week in End Times Cinema provide a sardonic—yet sobering—guide to the societal breakdown of 2020s America. 

more here.

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Scott Alexander at Astral Codex Ten:

What’s the difference between ‘real’ and ‘roleplaying’?

One possible answer invokes internal reality. Are the AIs conscious? Do they “really” “care” about the things they’re saying? We may never figure this out. Luckily, it has no effect on the world, so we can leave it to the philosophers1.

I find it more fruitful to think about external reality instead, especially in terms of causes and effects.

Does Moltbook have real causes?If an agent posts “I hate my life, my human is making me work on a cryptocurrency site and it’s the most annoying thing ever”, does this correspond to a true state of affairs? Is the agent really working on a cryptocurrency site? Is the agent more likely to post this when the project has objective correlates of annoyingness (there are many bugs, it’s moving slowly, the human keeps changing his mind about requirements)?

Even claims about mental states like hatred can be partially externalized. Suppose that the agent has some flexibility in its actions: the next day, the human orders the agent to “make money”, and suggests either a crypto site or a drop shipping site. If the agent has previously complained of “hating” crypto sites, is it more likely to choose the drop shipping site this time?

More here.

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Paul Grimstad at The Baffler:

There is an especially gnarly chapter more than halfway through Ulysses called the “Oxen of the Sun” in which Joyce’s weirdly adversarial virtuosity takes the form of a pastiche of the evolution of English prose, which is at the same time an allegory of the nine months of fetal gestation (the chapter is set in a maternity hospital). It is mostly a slog, but it is an exhilarating slog. As you hack your way through Joyce “doing” Malory and Bunyan and Swift and Pepys and Defoe and Sterne and Goldsmith and Burke and Gibbon and Lamb and De Quincey and Carlyle and Pater, and on up to “Irish, Bowery slang and broken doggerel,” a part of your reading mind succumbs to a serenely disbelieving loop: He did this. He did this. If “Oxen” occupies a region of Ulysses where Joyce’s exquisite ear for memorably musical sentences (“Mild fire of wine kindled his veins”) takes a back seat to the leaden hum of meta-literature, that is no reason not to be awed by his chutzpah.

Michael Lentz’s Schattenfroh—rendered heroically from German into English by Max Lawton—lives mostly on the nether side of the line Joyce crossed in “Oxen.” At one thousand pages it is almost by definition a slog.

more here.

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Eddy Keming Chen, Mikhail Belkin, Leon Bergen & David Danks in Nature:

We think the current evidence is clear. By inference to the best explanation — the same reasoning we use in attributing general intelligence to other people — we are observing AGI of a high degree. Machines such as those envisioned by Turing have arrived. Similar arguments have been made before, and have engendered controversy and push-back. Our argument benefits from substantial advances and extra time. As of early 2026, the case for AGI is considerably more clear-cut.

We now examine ten common objections to the idea that current LLMs display general intelligence. Several of them echo objections that Turing himself considered in 1950. Each, we suggest, either conflates general intelligence with non-essential aspects of intelligence or applies standards that individual humans fail to meet.

More here.

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Paul Krugman at his Substack:

On Monday India and the European Union concluded negotiations on a breakthrough free trade agreement. Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission — the EU’s executive branch — called it “the mother of all deals.” That description is somewhat over the top. Yet the agreement is in fact historic and important in ways that go beyond economics. For it shows that the world is becoming ever more estranged from an erratic, abusive United States. In other words, other countries are moving, step by step, toward an economic divorce from America.

Unlike Donald Trump, who thinks of international trade as a zero-sum game, the Europeans and the Indians understand that a free trade agreement between them is a very good deal for both parties. They are two very big economies. Although Trump administration officials like to sneer at European economic performance, the economy of the European Union is roughly the same size as ours.

More here.

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Beck and Judkis in The Washington Post:

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No Man is an Island

No man is an island,
Entire of itself,
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thy friend’s
Or of thine own were:
Any man’s death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind,
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.

by John Donne

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Olivia Laing in The Guardian:

In September 2015, Gayle Newland stood trial accused of sex by deception. It was alleged that she created an online identity as a man and used this character, Kye Fortune, to lure another woman into a sexual relationship, which was consummated repeatedly with the assistance of a blindfold and a prosthetic penis. The woman believed she was having sex with Kye until one day her ring caught on his hat and she felt long hair. Tearing off her blindfold, she realised her male lover was actually her female friend. As these lurid, almost fairytale details seeped out, the case went viral. “Sex attacker who posed as man found guilty” was one of the milder headlines.

The trial caught Izabella Scott’s attention because it was a real-life example of a plot device she recognised from literature. The bed trick can be found in folk stories and operas, in Chaucer and Shakespeare. Often told for comic effect, it concerns sex by trickery and deception, under cover of darkness. “The plot suggests,” Scott writes, “that, in bed, anyone might be mistaken for anyone else.”

It dropped out of literary fashion with the invention of artificial light, but here it was again, unfolding in a 21st-century court of law.

More here.

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Gerd Gigerenzer in Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics:

Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky’s joint papers from the 1970s and 1980s have inspired many, including myself. These articles magically turned statistical thinking—previously a niche interest—into a major re-search focus. Kahneman and Tversky revived the concept of heuristics, which had largely been forgotten at the time, and played a pivotal role in bringing psychology to the attention of economics and other social sciences. I was also deeply influenced by Tversky’s seminal work on the foundations of measurement, which inspired my first book on modeling.

In their joint work, known as the heuristics-and-biases program, Kahneman and Tversky argued that human judgment systematically deviates from the norms of probability and logic, resulting in predictable cognitive biases. These biases were attributed to heuristics—mental shortcuts—which led to a broader narrative in behavioral economics and psychology that emphasized human fallibility in decision-making.

The heuristics-and-biases program sparked intense debate on the nature of human rationality. This debate placed me in direct opposition to Kahneman and Tversky, with Kahneman referring to me in Thinking, Fast and Slow as “our most persistent critic”.

More here.

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Farah N. Jan at The Conversation:

On Jan. 28, 2026, President Donald Trump sharply intensified his threats to the Islamic Republic, suggesting that if Tehran did not agree to a set of demands, he could mount an attack “with speed and violence.” To underline the threat, the Pentagon moved aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln – along with destroyers, bombers and fighter jets – to positions within striking distance of the country.

Foremost among the various demands the U.S. administration has put before Iran’s leader is a permanent end to the country’s uranium enrichment program. It has also called for limits to the development of ballistic missiles and a cutting off of Tehran’s support for proxy groups in the Middle East, including Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis.

Trump apparently sees in this moment an opportunity to squeeze an Iran weakened by a poor economy and massive protests that swept through the country in early January.

But as a scholar of Middle Eastern security politics and proliferation, I have concerns.

More here.

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David Mason at The Hudson Review:

The adventure story and the historical romance were two genres at which Stevenson excelled, but he was also brilliant at the macabre psychological parable in his novella The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), and the supernatural in his short story “Thrawn Janet” (1881). The first of these takes on the very “fortress of identity” (in Jekyll’s words) that has so obsessed us of late but turns it into something timeless. Damrosch tells us that the novella caused a furious argument between Stevenson and his wife, in which she comes off better than he does. When Louis read aloud his first draft, as Fanny’s son Lloyd recalled, “Her praise was constrained; the words seemed to come with difficulty; and then all at once she broke out with criticism. He had missed the point, she said; had missed the allegory; had made it merely a story—a magnificent bit of sensationalism—when it should have been a masterpiece.” Damrosch continues, “Fanny’s point was that Louis had ruined the story by turning it into a mere tale about a secret life. . . . What was needed was not just a character wearing a disguise, but something far more profound: a character struggling with a deeper hidden self that breaks loose and fights for supremacy.” Louis resisted, then came around, went back to work, and gave her the masterpiece she wanted. Thereafter, he jokingly referred to her as “the critic on the hearth.”

more here.

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Peter Lukacs at Aeon Magazine:

Popular wisdom holds we can ‘rewire’ our brains: after a stroke, after trauma, after learning a new skill, even with 10 minutes a day on the right app. The phrase is everywhere, offering something most of us want to believe: that when the brain suffers an assault, it can be restored with mechanical precision. But ‘rewiring’ is a risky metaphor. It borrows its confidence from engineering, where a faulty system can be repaired by swapping out the right component; it also smuggles that confidence into biology, where change is slower, messier and often incomplete. The phrase has become a cultural mantra that is easier to comprehend than the scientific term, neuroplasticity – the brain’s ability to change and form new neural connections throughout life.

But what does it really mean to ‘rewire’ the brain? Is it a helpful shorthand for describing the remarkable plasticity of our nervous system or has it become a misleading oversimplification that distorts our grasp of science?

more here.

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Edd Gent in Singularity Hub:

Creativity is a trait that AI critics say is likely to remain the preserve of humans for the foreseeable future. But a large-scale study finds that leading generative language models can now exceed the average human performance on linguistic creativity tests.

The question of whether machines can be creative has gained new salience in recent years thanks to the rise of AI tools that can generate text and images with both fluency and style. While many experts say true creativity is impossible without lived experience of the world, the increasingly sophisticated outputs of these models challenge that idea.

More here.

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Lawrence Weschler at Wondercabinet:

So I was thinking about the old logic problem/koan
”Time flies like an arrow, but fruit flies like a banana”
and expanding it out to
”Horse flies like fruit flies like me like bananas.”

And that got me to thinking about how much of a hurdle it must have been to get bots to “understand” such statements or be able to work with them, which in turn got me to thinking it might be fun to try them out on Monsieur Chat and see what he/it made of them.

But, for that matter, I’d also like to try the following out on the good Monsieur:
”You can take a bot to humor but you can’t make it laugh.”

Because I think that is key: I don’t think bots are or would ever be capable of laughing.

I mean, sure, they could and do analyze why something might be funny, I suspect they would be able to analyze why the koan above is funny, and I suppose they could even be taught to make the noise of laughter at appropriate junctures in a “conversation”—but could they ever experience the taken-by-surprise involuntary seizure of surprise that is a good laugh?

more here.

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—My grandson is the special events coordinator at the
Natural History Museum in London. I sent him
this poem this morning. N

You Can Plan Events

“You can plan events, but if they go according
to your plan they are not events.*
It is the history of the world I thought to write
this morning sitting up in my bed drinking coffee,
the how of hows, the what of whats, the why of whys,
but a rackety bird begins his day, now a soft-voiced dove,
in the distance a drone of cars going about their business.
The dog has leapt on the bed and lies in a curl,
nose tucked under her tail.  the world is too sweet
for me to worry about how it got here – God created
Eden.  After that, nothing went according to plan.

by Nils Peterson

*W.B. Yeats’s brother. He was a painter.

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