Alexander Durie at Literary Hub:

The Question of Palestine was published in 1979, one year after Said’s pivotal book Orientalism and two before Covering Islam—a trilogy that helped found post-colonial theory and develop a framework to critique the West’s stereotypical and often racist lens of the Arab and Muslim world. The Question of Palestine was particularly noteworthy for being the first English-language book to narrate the Palestinian experience and deconstruct Zionism as a settler-colonial project.

It remains an essential read from arguably the most influential Palestinian-American scholar to have lived. Reading it today brings reflections on how everything and nothing has changed, as Israel’s genocidal attacks on Gaza, its bombing of Lebanon, and annexation of the West Bank continue. That is why a new re-issue of this book is so timely.

More here.

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From Time Magazine:

Toi Labs TrueLoo

Every bowel movement contains clues about your health, which is why doctors often ask patients for stool samples. Now imagine if your bodily waste could be constantly monitored, tracked, and analyzed, creating a more holistic look at your health? Enter Toi Labs’ TrueLoo, an AI-powered toilet seat that optically scans your stool and urine for concerning changes. It looks like a normal toilet seat, it fits on your existing toilet, and it’s currently used in more than 50 senior living facilities. Alerts and data are currently delivered directly to care personnel in such facilities, the company has plans to release a user-facing app. “I liken it to a team of doctors that can peer into your toilet bowl every day,” says device inventor Vik Kashyap, founder and CEO of Toi Labs.

More here.

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Iglasias and Freeman in Science:

Cecilia hadn’t expected the video to resonate so deeply. She often watched online talks about her field of research. But this one didn’t just present pioneering scientific ideas; it put into words the uncomfortable reality she had been grappling with. She was nearly 30 years old and single, and she had recently interviewed for a postdoc position that would require her to uproot her life yet again. She couldn’t ignore a growing question: whether and how she would be able to have children. The talk, by anthropologist Marcia Inhorn, explored the silent struggles many highly educated women face in balancing their careers not just with motherhood, but with what comes before: relationships and planning for a family. It was an “aha!” moment. Cecilia sent it to her friend and fellow academic Erika, who responded immediately: “Why haven’t we talked about this before?”

We’d often discussed how motherhood seemed like a career roadblock. But Inhorn’s talk illuminated something else: Many women in academia weren’t delaying parenthood by choice. Rather, they found themselves unable to reconcile their biological clocks with the unpredictable, demanding pace of an academic career.

More here.

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Tiny Garden

In the early morning light,
there is a certain majesty
to my tiny garden
………
The plants within their pots
have grown with abandon
beyond their framework of ceramic
and half-bourbon barrels
………
Tendrils reach in all directions
some hanging,
floating on the air
………
Others twisting round each other
in loving embrace
Each stem and vine and leaf
offers a gesture of kindness
and hopefulness

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Sheon Han in Asterisk:

The origin of rationalist writing is commonly traced back to the comments section of Overcoming Bias, a group blog about cognitive biases and related topics that is now the personal blog of economist Robin Hanson. Eliezer Yudkowsky, a prominent contributor, spun off an online forum called LessWrong in 2009, dedicated to the practice of “applied rationality.” Within a few years, its top writers — for example, Scott Alexander, Katja Grace, Luke Muehlhauser — had launched their own blogs, forming what became the rationalist blogosphere.

The internet of the early aughts was a warm petri dish for blogging. Compared to its contemporaries, early rationalist writings were like Crooked Timber but more left-brained, Marginal Revolution but more subcultural, and 3 Quarks Daily but weirder. Topically, there was a resemblance to Aaron Swartz’s blog archive Raw Thought — select a random article and you might find anything from a diary entry to a policy memo, a technical specification, or a manifesto.

More here.

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Robert Rosenberger in Psyche:

While behind the wheel of a car, a significant level of distraction can accompany one action in particular: phone usage. For some, this can result in severe driving impairment. It represents a serious danger hidden within the connective rhythms of our everyday lives.

Some countries have made it illegal to hold a phone while driving, effectively outlawing handheld calls behind the wheel. So have several states in the US.

Safety advocates go further and argue that even hands-free versions of calling, texting and internet usage while driving can be dangerous. And yet, it is possible to infer the opposite from the world around us. For example, those laws that ban handheld phones simultaneously allow for hands-free phone usage behind the wheel, perhaps implying that this is a safe thing to do. What’s more, the dashboards of contemporary cars are built with the expectation that drivers will be using their phones.

More here.

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Ismar Volić at The Conversation:

Americans say they are angry at the political dysfunction, disgusted with the divisive rhetoric, weary from the lack of options, and feel unheard and unrepresented. I am a mathematician who studies quantitative aspects of democracy, and in my view, the reason for this widespread dissatisfaction is evident: The mechanisms of American democracy are broken at a fundamental level.

Research shows that there are clear mathematical fixes for these malfunctions that would implement sound democratic practices supported by evidence. They won’t solve every ailment of American democracy: For example, Altering Supreme Court rulings or expanding voting access are more political or administrative than they are based in math. Nevertheless, each of these changes – especially in combination with one another – could make American democracy more responsive to its citizens.

More here.

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Rachel Wetzler at Artforum:

Writing in 1993, the late critic Dave Hickey described beauty as a kind of dirty word in the art world, believed to be hopelessly tainted by the market: “Beautiful art sells. If it sells itself, it is an idolatrous commodity; if it sells something else, it is a seductive advertisement.” Perhaps the clearest sign of beauty’s shifting fortune is the rehabilitation of Hickey’s own critical reputation. In his introduction to the 2023 reissue of his 1993 collection The Invisible Dragon: Essays on Beauty, he describes the paradoxical combination of renown and revulsion with which his work was met: “In the Dragon’s wake,” he writes, “the endowed lecturer was deposited unceremoniously at a Ramada Inn beside an empty highway and left to dine out of the candy machine.” (Indeed, I recall being assigned an essay from the book in a methods seminar during my first semester of graduate school back in 2010, where it was cast as a brash and unserious provocation.) But returning to The Invisible Dragon now, in anticipation of the new collection of his writings Feint of Heart, posthumously published by David Zwirner Books this past September, I wonder if he wasn’t on to something. For Hickey, the invocation of beauty didn’t represent a conservative retrenchment, but an appealing anarchy: It directly addresses itself to the beholder, requiring neither interpretive intermediaries nor ameliorative social purpose.

more here.

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Kermit Pattison in Scientific American:

No part of our body is as perishable as the brain. Within minutes of losing its supply of blood and oxygen, our delicate neurological machinery begins to suffer irreversible damage. The brain is our most energy-greedy organ, and in the hours after death, its enzymes typically devour it from within. As cellular membranes rupture, the brain liquifies. Within days, microbes may consume the remnants in the stinky process of putrefaction. In a few years, the skull becomes just an empty cavity.

In some cases, however, brains outlast all other soft tissues and remain intact for hundreds or thousands of years. Archaeologists have been mystified to discover naturally preserved brains in ancient graveyards, tombs, mass graves and even shipwrecks. Scientists at the University of Oxford published a study earlier this year that revealed that such brains are more common than previously recognized. By surveying centuries of scientific literature, researchers counted more than 4,400 cases of preserved brains that were up to 12,000 years old. “The brain just decays super quickly, and it’s really weird that we find it preserved,” says Alexandra Morton-Hayward, a molecular scientist at Oxford and lead author of the new study. “My overarching question is: Why on Earth is this possible? Why is it happening in the brain and no other organ?” Such unusual preservation involves the “misfolding” of proteins—the cellular building blocks—and bears intriguing similarities to the pathologies that cause some neurodegenerative conditions.

More here.

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Smiriti Mallapaty in Nature:

Scientists in Boston, Massachusetts have made reprogrammed stem cells from the blood of centenarians. They plan to share the cells with other researchers to better understand the factors that contribute to a long and healthy life. Early experiments are already providing insights on brain ageing. Centenarians offer an opportunity to study longevity. People who’ve lived to 100 have an amazing ability to bounce back from insult and injury, says George Murphy, a stem-cell biologist at the Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine. One centenarian he knows recovered from the 1912 Spanish flu and COVID-19, twice. One theory that explains centenarians’ robust age is that they possess a genetic makeup that protects them from diseases.

But testing that idea is a challenge. People of that age are rare, which makes blood and skin samples from them a precious resource for research. That gave Murphy and his colleagues the idea to create a bank of centenarian cells that could be shared among scientists.

More here.

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Stephen Smith at Literary Review:

The maker of abstract grids enclosing lozenges of colour, Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) was one of the two or three epoch-shaping artists of the last century. But his life story isn’t widely known and few of us would be able to identify him from a photograph. Because his work seems cool and smart, and designers have sampled it ad nauseam for that very reason, we tend to imagine that he was probably cool and smart too.

The reality is rather more complex and curious, according to Nicholas Fox Weber’s assiduous and sensitive biography. Mondrian lived alone in a series of rented flats which weren’t much more than bedsits. They were in crowded corners of big cities: Paris, London and New York. He could seldom afford to heat his digs, and he ate sparingly, even when he was entertained by his few loyal supporters. He was a hypochondriac (to be fair to Mondrian, he also enjoyed poor health). He expected his long-suffering friends to console him, but he could be glassily unavailable to them. As with a number of artists, there were difficulties with girls: broadly speaking, Mondrian avoided them, though he appreciated their company as dance partners. This frowningly serious man liked to comb out his toothbrush moustache, climb into an ensemble perilously close to a zoot suit and cut a rug to the latest dance style – the Charleston or the boogie-woogie, say.

more here.

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Julia Webster Ayuso in The Dial:

On the evening of October 16, 1984, the body of four-year-old Grégory Villemin was pulled out of the Vologne river in Eastern France. The little boy had disappeared from the front garden of his home in Lépanges-sur-Vologne earlier that afternoon. His mother had searched desperately all over the small village, but nobody had seen him.

It quickly became clear that his death wasn’t a tragic accident. The boy’s hands and feet had been tied with string, and the family had received several threatening letters and voicemails before he disappeared. The following day, another letter was sent to the boy’s father, Jean-Marie Villemin. “I hope you will die of grief, boss,” it read in messy, joined-up handwriting. “Your money will not bring your son back. This is my revenge, you bastard.”

It was the beginning of what would become France’s best-known unsolved murder case. The case has been reopened several times, and multiple suspects have been arrested. Grégory’s mother, Christine, was charged with the crime and briefly jailed but later acquitted. Jean-Marie also served prison time after he shot dead his cousin Bernard Laroche, who had emerged as a prime suspect. The investigating judge, Jean-Michel Lambert, who was assigned the case at age 32 and made critical mistakes early in the investigation, killed himself in 2017.

More here.

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Adam Greenfield in the The Ideas Letter:

On April 2, 2024, a white Briton named Callum Parslow entered the restaurant of a countryside hotel called the Pear Tree Inn, walked up to a dark-skinned man he found eating there — someone completely unknown to him, evidently chosen entirely at random — and asked where he was from. When the diner answered that he was from east Africa, Parslow pulled out a knife he had ordered from America specifically for the occasion, and stabbed him repeatedly.

Parslow’s chosen victim, an asylum seeker from Eritrea named Nahom Hagos, was fortunate to survive the attack. In Parslow, what he’d brushed up against wasn’t simply garden-variety racist hatred, but a form of hatred equipped with an ideology — and still more, as the attack itself suggests, one increasingly inclined to express itself in lethal action. Consider the justification Parslow later attempted to post to his social-media accounts:

“I just did my duty to England…They will call me a terrorist, they will call me an extremist: I am neither. I am but a gardener tending to the great garden of England. I removed the weeds; I exterminated the harmful, invasive species.”

He goes on to blame “the evil enemies of nature and of England,” whom he identifies as “the Jews, the Marxists and the globalists.” White-supremacist violence has, of course, been a sadly familiar feature of our world since time out of mind, and there’s nothing even remotely novel about that specific list of designated enemies. But the ecological language in Parslow’s pompous little screed is notable, especially its conflation of nature and nation, and it speaks to a current of thought we desperately need to understand as it not merely increasingly drives events like this unprovoked assault, but inches ever closer to mainstream currency.

More here.

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Sarah Scoles at Undark:

How autonomous and semi-autonomous technology will operate in the future is up in the air, and the U.S. government will have to decide what limitations to place on its development and use. Those decisions may come sooner rather than later—as the technology advances, global conflicts continue to rage, and other countries are faced with similar choices—meaning that the incoming Trump administration may add to or change existing American policy. But experts say autonomous innovations have the potential to fundamentally change how war is waged: In the future, humans may not be the only arbiters of who lives and dies, with decisions instead in the hands of algorithms.

For some experts, that’s a net-positive: It could reduce casualties and soldiers’ stress. But others claim that it could instead result in more indiscriminate death, with no direct accountability, as well as escalating conflicts between nuclear-armed nations.

More here.

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Christopher Caldwell in the NYT:

Who could have seen Donald Trump’s resounding victory coming? Ask the question of an American intellectual these days and you may meet with embittered silence. Ask a European intellectual and you will likely hear the name of Wolfgang Streeck, a German sociologist and theorist of capitalism.

In recent decades, Mr. Streeck has described the complaints of populist movements with unequaled power. That is because he has a convincing theory of what has gone wrong in the complex gearworks of American-driven globalization, and he has been able to lay it out with clarity. Mr. Streeck may be best known for his essays in New Left Review, including a dazzling series on the cascade of financial crises that followed the crash of 2008. He resembles Karl Marx in his conviction that capitalism has certain internal contradictions that make it unsustainable — the more so in its present “neoliberal” form. His latest book, “Taking Back Control? States and State Systems After Globalism,” published this month, asks whether the global economy as it is now set up is compatible with democracy. He has his doubts.

Understand Mr. Streeck and you will understand a lot about the left-wing movements that share his worldview — Syriza in Greece, Podemos in Spain and the new Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance in Germany. But you will also understand Viktor Orban, Brexit and Mr. Trump.

More here. See here Adam Tooze’s review of Streeck’s How Will Capitalism End? 

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Neil Warner in Phenomenal World:

The threat of a return to the 1970s has long been a rhetorical feature of the British establishment. From the New Labour government’s Third Way reforms, to Jeremy Corbyn’s ambitious manifestos, and through to the current Labour Government’s rather modest spending increases, any prospects of redistributive taxation and spending, resurrection of trade union power, more worker-friendly policies, or state direction of industrial policy have been relentlessly attacked as a return to that dreaded decade.

The accusations are peculiar because, on the face of it, recent years have been very different from the 1970s. Trade-union power and militancy in the UK remain far weaker than before, the state no longer controls capital flows as it did prior to 1979, and competing ideological systems no longer overlap with geopolitics as they did during the Cold War.

Talk about going back to the 1970s, then, isn’t prompted by any real prospect of returning to those years or the conditions that underpinned them. Rather the 1970s have come to stand as a kind of shorthand for catastrophe—a catastrophe that Labour governments are particularly prone to. It was in the 1970s—as few in Britain are allowed to forget—that the overwhelming power and intransigence of the unions paralyzed British life, crippled the economy, and fuelled uncontrollable inflation, while state control and ownership stifled innovation and created inefficiency. On both the left and the right, the crisis of the 1970s is perceived to have laid the ground for Thatcher’s rise; facing the spiralling crisis, the 1974–79 Labour Government—led first by Harold Wilson, then by Jim Callaghan—is either portrayed as having been helpless in the face of the economic crisis and union power, or as having advanced its own strand of neoliberal reform now seen as mostly indiscernible from Thatcherism.

More here.

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Branko Milanovic over at his Substack:

A simple-minded answer to the question is, No. The IMF is entirely dedicated to  preserving the world capitalist system and any socialist must disapprove of it.  I think this answer is wrong. But before I explain it, I have say a few words about the Fund.

Recently, I have been involved more with the IMF and have witnessed how keen they are to remain an influential player in the 21^st century. Moreover, to do that as a truly international organization under the conditions of extraordinary high worldwide tensions, threats of wars, and mercantilist trade policies.

My relations with the Fund go back to my early years in the World Bank. In those days, the Fund missions would ask the World Bank to provide one of their (junior) economists to join the Fund ostensibly to maintain communication and give to the World Bank the appearance of some decision-making role regarding social sectors and public expenditures. I thus went, very young, to about five or six Fund missions to Turkey.

The Fund missions were impressive. They benefited from an unparalleled access to government officials and to the data, but they also had excellent people to study these data. Their great advantage was (and is) access to government knowledge and information; their great disadvantage was/is lack of contact with the rest of the country. Yet, as I will argue, this never was the Fund’s mission—nor should it be.

More here.

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“Richard Feynman was one of the most influential physicists of his generation and in 1965, he and two colleagues were awarded the Nobel Prize. In June of 1945, his 25-year-old wife and high-school sweetheart, Arline, passed away after succumbing to tuberculosis. 16 months later, Richard wrote his late wife a love letter and sealed it in an envelope. It remained unopened until after his death in 1988.”

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