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David Pozen, Ryan Doerfler, and Samuel Bagenstos in The Nation:

The Trump administration’s assault on higher education continues to escalate. The White House has pressured universities into shutting down diversity and equity programs of all sorts, terminated hundreds of millions of dollars in research grants inconsistent with its political agenda, and moved to slash reimbursements for the grants that remain. The Department of Education has opened investigations into more than 60 colleges and universities. Most alarming, the Department of Homeland Security has started sending agents onto campuses across the country to arrest and deport noncitizen students and faculty who have engaged in pro-Palestinian advocacy.

In hindsight, all of this looks predictable. Vice President Vance gave a speech in 2021 titled “The Universities Are the Enemy.” The Heritage Foundation’s Project Esther calls for the use of counterterrorism tactics to “disrupt and degrade” student activism in the name of combating antisemitism. And attacks on universities’ finances and freedoms have become a defining feature of authoritarian regimes worldwide.

More here.

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April White at JSTOR Daily:

The words were etched in four languages, scratched into the edge of the pale wood by at least a dozen different hands, perhaps over the course of decades. When researchers translated and contextualized the overlapping text—faded in some spots, deliberately scratched out in others—they discovered messages of pride and dismissal, hope and despair, deep musings and passing thoughts shared in poetic verse, lyrics, symbols, and now-indecipherable allusions. If the slender board had been 2,000 years old, the find might have been a Rosetta Stone, celebrated as the key to unlocking the stories of long-disappeared cultures. But in the stacks of the Alderman Library on the campus of the University of Virginia, the pencil and ink on the carrel shelf looked like nothing more than meaningless graffiti to almost everyone—except Professor Lise Dobrin and her students. In the spring of 2019, the budding anthropologists of Dobrin’s Literacy and Orality course began to document the graffiti that had collected on the 176 study carrels in the nine-story Alderman Library “New Stacks” since the building’s construction in 1967. The idle doodles and stray observations inked onto the peg boards, painted concrete, and stained wood furniture were destroyed when the building was demolished in the summer of 2020 to make way for a new library.

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Mark Jarman at The Hudson Review:

What was Emersonian? I first saw the term used in an essay by Harold Bloom called “The New Transcendentalism” about “the visionary strain” in the American poets W. S. Merwin, John Ashbery, and A. R. Ammons. Their excellence as poets (Bloom ranked them 3, 2, 1) depended almost entirely on their Emersonianism. Bloom wrote as if everyone, including the women he omitted, knew what it meant. Now I think he meant unrestrained by conventions of a closed system, like Christianity or the Boy Scouts of America. To be Emersonian was to be true to one’s own system, whatever that might be, idealist, visionary, in any case, a poetry of the sublime and the large statement, the lingua franca of Wallace Stevens, say, but also the kitchen sink realism of William Carlos Williams, though not as wild and visionary as William Blake, or as talented. Could we say existentialist? American poets who dwelt in the Emersonian sunshine might write free verse or in song meters, like Blake. Nevertheless, Emerson’s idealism was both principle and excuse for their poetry, with Whitman and Dickinson as influential figures. Whitman’s muse was installed amid the kitchenware. Dickinson’s lived in her upstairs bedroom. Domesticated but wild, wolves in Victorian sheepskin, these Emersonians were ordained to go uncollared but prophetic, unpenned with fountain pen in hand.

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Words Are Everything Else

our first teacher?
survival

her reward?
evolution

fleeing the sabretooth
we cried out in fear

others heard it
as warning.

so we were harried
into language

where we found
bricks for a palace

now we doubly dwell
creatures of events

yet inhabitants
of a house of mystery

by Nils Peterson

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H. Alan Scott in Newsweek:

If there’s anyone who knows how to play a wealthy man with a secret, it’s Jon Hamm. From Mad Men‘s Don Draper to Andrew Cooper turning to a life of crime to maintain his lavish lifestyle in his new series Your Friends and Neighbors (Apple TV+), Hamm knows. “I’m really good casting for this, if I do say so myself,” Hamm laughs, “absurd wealth is what we’re looking at here,” and the secrets its pursuit can reveal. “Late-stage capitalism and rampant materialism, and what does it really mean? Why are we measuring ourselves against other people using the metric of just who has a bigger pile of stuff?” While he knows “not everybody can resonate with having to make their $300,000 mortgage” like his character, “people can certainly identify with losing their job through no fault of their own.” Between Mad Men and some of his Emmy-nominated work on The Morning Show, Fargo and Landman, Hamm is confident that he’s “earned my place,” but is mostly “fortunate” that he gets to work with those he admires. “To work with those people is a tremendous gift.”

More here.

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Bryan Burroughs in The Yale Review:

For sheer cushiness, there’s a case to be made that there has never been a more palatial home for writers than Vanity Fair during Graydon Carter’s twenty-five-year run as editor from 1992 to 2017—a halcyon era for magazines that, given the internet-fueled destruction of print publications over the last fifteen years, already feels like ages ago. I was a writer there for all of it, and I savored every minute. If I share my part of its story accurately, you will probably hate me.

It is really Carter’s tale to tell, though. His winged impresario hair and singsong baritone made Graydon, as he was universally known, an icon of the period, a chortling counterpoint to The New Yorker’s Eustace Tilley mascot.

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James E. Block in The Hedgehog Review:

The classic liberal society of participatory institutions, competitive markets, and social mobility, which formerly nurtured and sustained the American belief in individual freedom and opportunity along with popular self-rule, is today scarcely a memory. In its place, the corporate organization of society—expanding for 150 years with its encompassing hierarchies and concentrations of power—recast American society and its popular practices and expectations. Amid the unending acceleration of production and technological innovation, omnipresent merchandisers and round-the-clock digital stimulants cajole and persuade individuals to pursue unprecedented enticements: indulgence in limitless appetitive striving and the pseudo-celebrity of ceaseless self-inflation. Facing an ever more constricting social reality and temptations ever less compatible with the core liberal virtues of moderation and self-restraint, Americans may wonder what is still liberal about their axiomatically liberal society. If the answer is cautionary, where does this leave us? And what options do we have?

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Caitlin L. Chandler at The Baffler:

Illich’s 1971 book, Deschooling Society, was a bestseller that made his name beyond the counterculture, but his 1973 primer Tools for Conviviality was most prominently displayed in ISSA’s library. In it, Illich warned of large-scale future catastrophes stemming from unchecked economic growth and industrialization. Technologies, he believed, had to serve communities and foster autonomy rather than prop up the credentialing power of institutions and the managerial class, which taught people to become desiring consumers and eroded their capacity for free thought and self-reliance. “The bureaucratic management of human survival is unacceptable on both ethical and political grounds,” wrote Illich, referring to technocratic solutions to ecological crisis that set limits on growth “just at the point beyond which further production would mean utter destruction.” As an alternative to this “managerial fascism,” he proposed the concept of “conviviality.” A convivial society would not only reject outright the gospel of industrial growth for its own sake; it would “guarantee for each member the most ample and free access to the tools of the community and limit this freedom only in favor of another member’s equal freedom.”

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Nathan H. Lents at Undark:

For generations, anthropologists have argued whether humans are evolved for monogamy or some other mating system, such as polygyny, polyandry, or promiscuity. But any exploration of monogamy must begin with a bifurcation of the concept into two completely different phenomena: social monogamy and sexual monogamy.

Sexual monogamy is just what it sounds like: The restriction of sexual intercourse to within a bonded pair. Social monogamy, also known as economic monogamy, describes the bonding itself, a strong, neurohormone-driven attachment between two adults that facilitates food and territory sharing, to the exclusion of others, for at least one breeding season, and generally purposed towards raising offspring.

Because these two aspects of monogamy are so often enjoined among humans, they are considered two sides of the same coin. But, as it turns out, they are entirely separable among animals.

More here.

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Cordelia Fine and Carole Hooven at Aeon Magazine:

A unique aspect of human developmental systems are our rich, cumulative cultures, which we inherit along with our genes. Thousands of years of gendered cultures, together with our evolved and unparalleled capacity for social learning, might have reduced the need for genes to be the ‘carriers’ of sex-linked behavioural features. Instead, as John Dupré, Daphna Joel and I have suggested, these traits could stabilise through norms that tell us what it means to be a woman or a man, and that are transferred across generations. If a male California mouse reliably inherits a father who will huddle and groom him, that’s a developmental resource that doesn’t have to be redundantly locked into genetically inherited biology. And if a male human reliably inherits a rich gendered culture that provides ample information and instruction about how to be man, along with minds tuned to acquire, enforce and internalise those norms, there’s much less need for genetic mechanisms to enforce the development of gendered traits, beyond a neural capacity for learning.

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Matt Richtel in the New York Times:

So sharp are partisan divisions these days that it can seem as if people are experiencing entirely different realities. Maybe they actually are, according to Leor Zmigrod, a neuroscientist and political psychologist at Cambridge University. In a new book, “The Ideological Brain: The Radical Science of Flexible Thinking,” Dr. Zmigrod explores the emerging evidence that brain physiology and biology help explain not just why people are prone to ideology but how they perceive and share information.

This conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity.

What is ideology?

It’s a narrative about how the world works and how it should work. This potentially could be the social world or the natural world. But it’s not just a story: It has really rigid prescriptions for how we should think, how we should act, how we should interact with other people. An ideology condemns any deviation from its prescribed rules.

You write that rigid thinking can be tempting. Why is that?

Ideologies satisfy the need to try to understand the world, to explain it. And they satisfy our need for connection, for community, for just a sense that we belong to something.

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Ghazal of Glance

First, it was a glance, then sleeplessness
See what love did to Rumi with a glance,

turning away from the mirror, you glimpsed
was it a trance, or what Khusrau  said, a glance

you went away without sending me a farewell
stoned, staring, a dialogue, a dance, a glance

A friend wrote from the Houston Americans
writing ghazals in English, Ah! a concocted stance,

lilt, cadence, and the beloved’s eyes blinking
coy, covering, and yet see that miracle of glance,

Persian and Urdu are alien to Northern palates
In English, you squint and then call it a glance,

In the empty corridors, language is desperate
Your absence is now limited to a mere glance

tear away shyness, rip apart the veil, reveal,
Rizwan is looking askance; return that glance.

by Rizwan Akhtar

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Andrew Marzoni in The Liberties:

Among the many grievances aired by Norman Podhoretz in his insufferable 1967 memoir Making It is an already septic grudge concerning The New Yorker’s publication of James Baldwin’s most famous essay in 1962. Titled, following the magazine’s convention, “Letter from a Region in My Mind,” this twenty-thousand word assemblage of memoir, reportage, and philosophical interrogation of the American condition that has become Baldwin’s rhetorical signature was filed by Baldwin as “Down at the Cross,” the name it would retain when reprinted the next year as the second part of The Fire Next Time.

According to Podhoretz, not long after succeeding Eliot Cohen in the wake of the founding editor’s suicide, he commissioned Baldwin to write a piece on the Nation of Islam, whose ascendance in New York alongside the sect’s most prominent minister, Malcolm X, was disconcerting the magazine’s white, liberal, and mostly Jewish readership. Around the same time, The New Yorker asked Baldwin for a dispatch from Africa, then in the midst of postcolonial revolt. In 1958, longtime fiction editor William Maxwell, an admirer of Baldwin’s first book of essays, Notes of a Native Son, collected from contributions to Commentary, The New Leader, The Reporter, Partisan Review, and Harper’s, had solicited Baldwin for unpublished work, and in July 1961, then-New Yorker EIC William Shawn signed a series of letters addressed to the authorities in the Congo, Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria, and Guinea identifying Baldwin as a New Yorker correspondent.

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Shelly Fan in Singularity Hub:

“That Cajun blackened shrimp recipe looks really good,” I tell my husband while scrolling through cooking videos online. The presenter describes it well: juicy, plump, smoky, a parade of spices. Without making the dish, I can only imagine how it tastes. But a new device inches us closer to recreating tastes from the digital world directly in our mouths. Smaller than a stamp, it contains a slurry of chemicals representing primary flavors like salty, sweet, sour, bitter, and savory (or umami). The reusable device mixes these together to mimic the taste of coffee, cake, and other foods and drinks.

Developed by researchers at Ohio State University, the device has a tiny gum-like strip linked to a liquid reservoir. It releases each taste component in a gel and pumps the resulting blend onto the tongue. The system is wireless and includes a sensor to control the chemical mixture. In a demonstration, one person dipped the sensor into some lemonade in San Francisco and transferred a facsimile of the taste to people wearing the devices in Ohio in real-time. Complex flavor profiles—say, a fried egg—are harder to simulate. And it’s likely awkward to have a device dangling on your mouth. But the work brings us a little closer to adding a new sense to virtual and augmented reality and making video games more immersive.

More here.

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Nick Davidson at Longreads:

Each balloon carried two copilots vying to prevail in the 1995 Coupe Aéronautique Gordon Bennett, ballooning’s oldest and most prestigious aeronautical race. The goal was to travel the farthest distance possible before landing. Only the world’s most daring and decorated aeronauts could claim a spot in the field. The race typically lasted one or two days, and occasionally stretched into a third. No Gordon Bennett balloon had ever flown a fourth night, but favorable weather and a stretch of newly opened airspace now made that feat attainable for the first time. “It was fabulous, and we knew it,” said Martin Stürzlinger, a member of the ground crew for a balloon called the D-Caribbean.

By noon on Monday, September 11, the race’s third day, only ten of the 15 balloons remained aloft. The rest had flown as far as they could before landing in Austria, Germany, or Poland. From the air, Wallace and Brielmann knew only that their friends Alan Fraenckel and John Stuart-Jervis, who raced under the U.S. Virgin Islands flag, were still flying nearby in the D-Caribbean. The two teams had remained within a couple dozen miles of each other for the race’s duration.

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Scott Alexander at Astral Codex Ten:

In 2021, a researcher named Daniel Kokotajlo published a blog post called “What 2026 Looks Like”, where he laid out what he thought would happen in AI over the next five years.

The world delights in thwarting would-be prophets. The sea of possibilities is too vast for anyone to ever really chart a course. At best, we vaguely gesture at broad categories of outcome, then beg our listeners to forgive us the inevitable surprises. Daniel knew all this and resigned himself to it. But even he didn’t expect what happened next.

He got it all right.

Okay, not literally all. The US restricted chip exports to China in late 2022, not mid-2024. AI first beat humans at Diplomacy in late 2022, not 2025. A rise in AI-generated propaganda failed to materialize. And of course the mid-2025 to 2026 period remains to be seen. But to put its errors in context, Daniel’s document was written two years before ChatGPT existed. Nobody except researchers and a few hobbyists had ever talked to an AI. In fact, talking to AI was a misnomer. There was no way to make them continue the conversation; they would free associate based on your prompt, maybe turning it into a paragraph-length short story. If you pulled out all the stops, you could make an AI add single digit numbers and get the right answer more than 50% of the time. Yet if you read Daniel’s blog post without checking the publication date, you could be forgiven for thinking it was a somewhat garbled but basically reasonable history of the last four years.

I wasn’t the only one who noticed.

More here.

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