Morley Musick at n+1:

Earlier this year, I interviewed a retired steelworker named Tom Wells, who had taken hundreds of color photographs of Chicago’s freight train tunnels in the late ’80s and early ’90s. At their peak, the tunnels encompassed sixty miles of track, forty feet below the sidewalk, extending from Superior Street south to 16th. Inside, small train cars—built and controlled by the Chicago Tunnel Company—carried coal, ash, mail, home goods, and newsprint from warehouses to ferry terminals along the river, making stops at buildings connected to the underground tracks by elevator shafts. The tunnels closed in 1954, by that time more of a curiosity than a financially viable operation. (I hadn’t heard of them until I started working on this piece.) Tom and his friends explored the network on their days off, documenting the train cars and the ephemera they found along the tracks: the signs, boots, and old telephone boxes left behind by workers.

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William Whyte at Literary Review:

Arriving as an undergraduate at Cambridge in 1961, Terry Eagleton was both overawed and underwhelmed by his supervisor, a man he calls Greenway in his memoir. ‘Greenway was the first truly civilised man I had ever encountered,’ Eagleton recalls. ‘He knew all about cheeses, wisteria, Rubens’s brushwork, herbaceous borders, flying buttresses, gilt-edged securities, the bird-life of Venezuela, varieties of Malaysian fruit, Leibniz, Gregorian chant, brandy, the law of tort, the manufacture of saddles, 17th-century military strategy, breeds of North African dog, the vowel-sounds of Afrikaans, the vegetation of the Minho valley.’ But ‘he had no more ideas in his head than a hamster’ and his comments on English literature, the subject he was ostensibly responsible for teaching, ‘seemed the kind of thing that Princess Margaret might say’.

Eagleton was probably a little unfair to Theodore Redpath, the polymathic model for this caricature. Although the playwright Simon Gray also thought him insipid, others disagreed. Gazing at Redpath over coffee, Sylvia Plath was so attracted by his ‘rich, chastened, wide mind’ that she ‘practically ripped him up to beg him to be my father’.

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Kyle Orland at Ars Technica:

If you hang out in any even vaguely AI-skeptical parts of the Internet, you’ve probably stumbled on plenty of memes and posts premised on data centers’ insatiable thirst for water to power evaporative cooling. But a new report from Amazon highlights just how little water all these AI data centers are using in aggregate, on a relative basis, even as individual data centers can strain local water supplies.

In a Thursday blog post, Amazon claims its data centers withdrew “about 2.5 billion gallons” globally in 2025. That number sounds incredibly large at first glance, but it looks downright puny compared to the 117 trillion gallons of water withdrawn in the US alone in 2015. It’s also useful to compare Amazon’s number to stats from more water-intensive areas, from the 3.3 trillion gallons used annually on US lawns and landscaping to the 1.3 trillion gallons a year used in California almond orchards to the 531 billion gallons a year used just for US golf courses.

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Carl Zimmer in The New York Times:

Linsey Marr, an environmental engineer, stood next to a pair of clear plastic boxes packed with tubes, nozzles and electronics, an odd-looking prototype that one day might serve to protect children in day care from airborne pathogens.

A nozzle filled the right-hand box with a faint silvery mist. A pump pulled some of that air into the left-hand box, where a sampler trapped floating particles and droplets. Soon, a digital screen bolted to the box turned red: “Detected! Dust mite allergen Der f 1.” A protein shed by dust mites, Der f 1 can trigger asthma attacks when inhaled. Dr. Marr’s device had detected 843 picograms of Der f 1 per cubic meter. A single grain of salt is about 10 million times as heavy. “Before this instrument, it would have taken us two days to figure out how much was in the air,” Dr. Marr said. “Now we’re doing it almost in real time.”

Dust mite allergens are not the only threats that Dr. Marr’s team aims to fish from the air. The technology, still evolving, can already sniff out influenza, the coronavirus and E. coli. “We have 10 different things that we’re able to detect, and by the end of the program, there will be 25 different things,” she said.

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Christopher Hooks in Harper’s Magazine:

The imperial capital has many beautiful buildings, and they are always kept tidy and clean. They have a quality that grates, though. The landscape is didactic, insistent. Somebody is always trying to teach you something. This is true, of course, of the monuments and museums that are purpose-built to press a vague sense of republican tradition into generations of American schoolchildren on field trips, but there is hardly a pediment or lintel or courtyard in Washington that is not given over to instruction from some half-remembered ancestor. It is a shouty place, and to mixed effect.

A hallway in the Capitol Building preserves Daniel Webster’s immortal proclamation that when tillage begins other arts follow. Broadly unobjectionable stuff. But was it really necessary, beneath a statue of a wise-looking man at the National Archives, to leave an enjoinder to study the past? And having put that on record, was it also necessary to leave a complementary warning, under a wise-looking woman, that what is past is prologue? All this hectoring from the grandfathers—and very occasionally, from a grandmother—gets a little more tolerable once you clock how many of these admonitions, exhortations, and commemorations can carry unintended or ironic meanings.

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Lindsey Bever in The Washington Post:

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Henry Giroux in CounterPunch:

Elon Musk is less an aberration than the grotesque byproduct of a capitalist order that converts inequality into virtue, exploitation into spectacle, and mistakes its own deepest failures for its greatest successes. The media frenzy surrounding the prospect of Musk becoming the world’s first trillionaire is not a celebration of human progress or individual initiative. It is a symptom of a deeper social and political crisis, one that exposes the power of class privilege, the corrupting forces of gangster capitalism, and a culture increasingly incapable of distinguishing wealth from worth or exploitation from human flourishing.

Musk is symptomatic of the rot of a capitalist system that generates staggering inequalities while concentrating wealth and power in the hands of a tiny elite whose fortunes depend not simply on markets, but on public subsidies, collective labor, social institutions, and shared resources, all sustained by an authoritarian culture animated by white supremacy, ultranationalism, and the mobilizing passions of fascist politics, especially in the age of Trump.  As Dan Dinello argues, Musk has become an “avatar of chaos, cruelty, and death.” The description is difficult to dismiss. How else are we to understand his role as Trump’s chief enforcer?

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Junot Diaz in The New York Times:

The term “one of a kind” gets bandied about in the arts quite a lot but the writer Amitav Ghosh not only deserves the encomium, he could function as a handy benchmark for assessing whether others merit it. Call it the Ghosh Minimum. If an artist is as arrestingly original and as bad-ass multivalent as Ghosh — sui generis. If not — ejusdem generis, like the rest of us.

Transnational and translingual, with a planet-spanning curiosity, Ghosh is a synthesist of the highest order, able to weave big, genre-bending ideas, vast sweeps of History and nuanced characterizations into compulsively readable narratives. He consistently centers voices and communities erased by Empire — that rare decolonial writer who grapples nimbly with small tender things and hyperobjects alike, without subducting either.

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One of the Citizens

What we have here is a mechanic who reads Nietzsche,
who talks of the English and the French Romantics
as he grinds the pistons; who takes apart the Christians
as he plunges the tarred sprockets and gummy bolts
into the mineral spirits that have numbed his fingers;
an existentialist who dropped out of school to enlist,
who lied and said he was eighteen, who gorged himself
all afternoon with cheese and bologna to make the weight
and guarded a Korean hill before he roofed houses,
first in east Texas, then here in north Alabama. Now
his work is logic and the sure memory of disassembly.
As he dismantles the engine, he will point out damage
and use, the bent nuts, the worn shims of uneasy agreement.
He will show you the scar behind each ear where they
put in the plates. He will tap his head like a kettle
where the shrapnel hit, and now history leaks from him,
the slow guile of diplomacy and the gold that war makes,
betrayal at Yalta and the barbed wall circling Berlin.
As he sharpens the blades, he will whisper of Ruby and Ray.
As he adjusts the carburetors, he will tell you
of finer carburetors, invented in Omaha, killed in Detroit,
of deals that fall like dice in the world’s casinos,
and of the commission in New York that runs everything.
Despiser of miracles, of engineers, he is as drawn
by conspiracies as his wife by the gossip of princesses,
and he longs for the definitive payola of the ultimate fix.
He will not mention the fiddle, though he played it once
in a room where farmers spun and curses were flung,
or the shelter he gouged in the clay under the kitchen.
He is the one who married early, who marshaled a crew
of cranky half-criminal boys through the incompletions,
digging ditches, setting forms for culverts and spillways
for miles along the right-of-way of the interstate;
who moved from construction to Goodyear Rubber
when the roads were finished; who quit each job because
he could not bear the bosses after he had read Kafka;
who, in his mid forties, gave up on Sartre and Camus
And set up shop in his Quonset hut behind the welder,
repairing what comes to him, rebuilding the small engines
of lawnmowers and outboards. And what he likes best
is to break it all down, to spread it out around him
like a picnic, and to find not just what’s wrong
but what’s wrong and interesting — some absurd vanity,
or work, that is its own meaning — so when it’s together
again and he’s fired it with an easy pull of the cord,
he will almost hear himself speaking, as the steel
clicks in the single cylinder, in a language almost
like German, clean and merciless, beyond good and evil.

by Rodney Jones
From Transparent Gestures
Houghton Mifflin, Boston Ma. 1989

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Jake Flanagin at the Los Angeles Review of Books:

The scariest thing about Meryl Streep’s performance in The Devil Wears Prada 2 might be just how relatively unscary it is. The character of Miranda Priestly, the silver-haired editor in chief of Runway magazine, has been stripped of the icy authority that, in the original film released two decades ago, made her equally terrifying and compelling.

On a superficial level, the trademark imperiousness remains—the opaque directives, the sneers across the conference table, the quaking coterie of editors and assistants. But the characterization has softened: this Miranda has been whittled down by a hailstorm of human resources complaints, advertiser sensitivities, and the slow erosion of legacy media’s institutional power. Runway, once a bastion of militant aesthetic decree, now bends toward the economics of clicks and influencer sponcon. Its figurehead has been reduced from absolute sovereign to Nordic-style constitutional monarch, more campy brand extension than C-suite despot, accountable to forces she can no longer fully command.

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Liz Cettina at the LARB:

The original 1915 edition of The Song of the Lark ends with a scrapbook in progress. By the novel’s conclusion, the protagonist, Thea Kronborg, has become an accomplished singer in New York City and the pride and joy of her hometown, the fictional Moonstone, Colorado. Thea’s success is especially significant for her aunt Tillie, who champions Thea throughout her childhood and is partly driven by a fascination with celebrities. When Thea is young, Tillie scrapbooks news clippings about actors and actresses, like vision boards crafted for Thea, through whose success her aunt will live vicariously. The creation of a scrapbook of Thea’s accomplishments confirms that the vision has been realized: Thea has made it.

Thea’s scrapbook is filled with news clippings and photographs, presenting a holistic sketch of her success and her person. While her aunt creates the earlier scrapbooks out of fandom or aspiration, she compiles Thea’s as a kind of proof: “If Moonstone doubted, she had evidence enough: in black and white, in figures and photographs, evidence in hair lines on metal disks.” The scrapbook solidifies and preserves Thea’s reputation, and if people need more evidence, she has it.

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Max Kozlov in Nature:

In the fraction of a second before a person speaks, their brain weaves together complex grammar, precise vocabulary and the underlying meaning of the language. Now, researchers have tracked the electrical crackle of individual brain cells in real time during unscripted conversations, capturing how sentences are built before a single word is spoken.

By observing these neurons in a region of the human brain called the frontotemporal cortex, scientists have discovered that individual brain cells act as specialized linguistic building blocks. “We used to think language was this diffuse, whole-network phenomenon,” says Ziv Williams, a neurosurgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) in Boston and co-author of the study. “But it turns out you have specific neurons that only care if a word is a noun, or only care if a phrase is ending.”

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Mehrdad Babadi at The Point:

In Taxi (2015), Jafar Panahi stages a brief but haunting moment that, in retrospect, feels like the seed of his most recent film, It Was Just an Accident (2025). Near the end of Taxi, Panahi, playing the taxi driver, becomes visibly unsettled after picking up his friend Nasrin Sotoudeh, the prominent Iranian human rights lawyer and activist. When she asks what is wrong, he replies that he has just heard a voice he thought he recognized: the voice of his interrogator. Sotoudeh tells him that many of her clients report the same experience, a lingering effect of being blindfolded during prison interrogations. The conversation soon shifts elsewhere, almost casually. A decade later, Panahi has returned to that fleeting moment of fear and turned it into the central narrative and emotional core of It Was Just an Accident.  

The film made Jafar Panahi only the second Iranian director, after Abbas Kiarostami, to win the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, the most prestigious prize in world art cinema. Yet despite the film’s widespread international acclaim, including Oscar and Golden Globe nominations, reactions within Iranian cultural circles have been divided.

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Nathan Gardels at Noema:

When Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine in 2022 with a direct assault on Kyiv, the conventional odds were that Russia’s post-Cold War military prowess, replete with a world-class nuclear arsenal, would readily conquer its former Soviet republic and fold it back into the restored empire.

Four years on, the battle not only still rages but it has also changed the nature of warfare as the first conflict to use AI-assisted precision-guided drones. Though pounded regularly by Russia, not least with hypersonic missiles as well as waves of drones, Ukraine has achieved the once unimaginable. It has increasingly brought the war deep into the Russian homeland, most recently hitting St. Petersburg — 1,000 miles away from Kyiv — with a drone strike on an oil refinery and military base supporting Russia’s war effort.

Similarly, the most damage done to the integral infrastructure of the oil-and-gas-rich U.S.-allied Gulf States at the height of the hot war with Iran was inflicted by inexpensive drone swarms launched by the theocratic state.

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