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Yascha Mounk at his own Substack:

The college essay is a deeply unfair way to select students for top colleges, one that is much more biased against the poor than standardized tests. The college essay wrongly encourages students to cast themselves as victims, to exaggerate the adversity they’ve faced, and to turn genuinely upsetting experiences into the focal point of their self-understanding. The college essay, dear reader, should be banned and banished and burned to the ground.

There are many tangible, “objective” reasons to oppose making personal statements a key part of the admissions process. Perhaps the most obvious is that they have always been the easiest part of the system to game. While rich parents can hire SAT tutors they can’t sit the standardized test in the stead of their offspring; they can, however, easily write the admissions essay for their kid or hire a “college consultant” who “works with” the applicant to “improve” that essay.

More here.

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Leo Goldsmith at The Current:

“Today a technological storm is raging, the result of which will be the ultimate democratization of the cinema.” So reads one of the many pronouncements of Dogme 95’s opening salvo—a manifesto that the movement’s cofounder, Lars von Trier, distributed on red paper to the attendees of a Paris conference on cinema’s first hundred years in 1995.

At that moment, the digital video camera was rapidly proliferating around the globe, penetrating into every crevice of contemporary life. No longer just a tool for recording America’s funniest home videos, soon this technology would be inescapable: everything from car dashboards to ATMs to nurseries to the interior of your large intestine would be outfitted with tiny cameras that could record continuously. By the turn of the millennium, this loose Danish film collective would produce its first handful of feature films in the format, and they would find kin at the opposite end of the film industry in the surprise blockbuster The Blair Witch Project (1999).

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Alan Dean at n+1:

A half generation younger than New Romanian Cinema’s original luminaries, Jude is at once their artistic peer and inheritor. He has made films firmly within the tradition and films that transgress nearly every axiom that defines it. His corpus includes two realist slow burns, three formally distinct historical films, a hyperreflexive admixture of Godard and Borat, a multimedia sex comedy, and a road-and-labor movie stitched together from the socialist archive and TikTok — and that’s just the feature films. While Jude hasn’t abandoned the guiding interests of New Romanian Cinema — especially its eye for the prosaic — he has also made a name for himself as one of its only directors willing to write and direct films about the Holocaust in Romania, Roma slavery, and contemporary right-wing nationalism, not to mention the internet, pornography, and the scandalous and lowbrow more generally. His triumphant latest, Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, affirms what Gorzo, Lazăr, and other critics have already argued: that Jude’s oeuvre simultaneously makes a claim on the legacy of one of the great film traditions of the 21st century and points to something radically new, for Romanian and world cinema alike.

more here.

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Tessa Hadley and Joanne O’Leary at the LRB:

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Sam Jacobs in Time Magazine:

Much has changed since 2001, when creative director D.W. Pine produced his first cover for TIME. (That cover, for a story about online privacy, rendered a desktop computer as a heavy-duty lock.) In 2010, Steve Jobs showed up at Time Inc. to show off the iPad; the cover would be designed for the tablet, and TIME would become the first newsweekly to launch on the Apple device. In 2014, as social media became the place millions of people came to consume all kinds of news, TIME launched its first moving cover image.

cross all that change, one thing has not: week after week, D.W. has overseen the creation of our cover. Today, we publish the 1,000th cover created by D.W., who first joined TIME in 1998 from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Longevity itself is worth celebrating, and while D.W.’s output alone makes him one of this century’s most influential people in media, it is how he has gone about his work that we want to celebrate.

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Zeeya Merali in Nature:

Five scientists who contributed to the development of the blockbuster weight-loss drugs Ozempic and Wegovy have picked up one of this year’s US$3-million Breakthrough prizes — the most lucrative awards in science.

Originally developed to treat diabetes, these drugs work by mimicking a hormone called glucagon-like peptide 1 (GLP-1) that controls blood sugar levels and helps to curb appetite. “This class of drugs truly saves lives, changes lives and brings joy back to people’s lives,” says Ziyad Al-Aly, a physician-scientist at the Veterans Affairs St. Louis Health Care System in Missouri, who recently led a massive study analysing data from almost two million people to evaluate the effects of such medication¹.

More here.

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David Adler, Vanessa Romero Rocha, and Michael Galant in Phenomenal World:

On January 12, tens of thousands of Mexican citizens packed into the Zócalo to hear President Claudia Sheinbaum deliver her report on the first 100 days of government. Her announcements reflected an agenda both ambitious in scale and comprehensive in scope: sixteen new laws and twelve constitutional reforms ranging from the recognition of Indigenous peoples and the real increase in the minimum wage, to the recovery of Mexico’s national ownership of natural resources and a crackdown on tax evasion. “Let it be heard loud and clear,” Sheinbaum said. “We will not return to the neoliberal model … We will continue with Mexican Humanism and with the maxim of ‘For the good of all, first the poor.’”

That maxim sits at the heart of the “Fourth Transformation,” the political-economic project inaugurated by Sheinbaum’s predecessor Andrés Manuel López Obrador, or AMLO. Founded during his own campaign for the presidency, AMLO’s National Regeneration Movement (Morena, in its Spanish abbreviation) drew inspiration from the country’s three prior great transformations—the War of Independence (1810–1821), the War of Reform (1857–1861), and the Mexican Revolution (1910–1917). A century on from the Revolution, AMLO claimed to recover its tradition of popular self-determination, proposing “a system of democratic planning of national development” to shape economic growth toward the goals of “independence” and the “political, social, and cultural democratization of the nation.” Sheinbaum now promises to construct a “second storey” atop this political edifice.

The return of “democratic planning” to Mexican governance would mark a sea change in the country’s prevailing political economy.

More here.

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Evgeny Morozov in The Ideas Letter:

There is a certain disorienting thrill in witnessing, over the past few years, the profusion of bold, often baffling, occasionally horrifying ideas pouring from the ranks of America’s tech elite.

Consider the heresies of Balaji Srinivasan and Peter Thiel, who, in celebrating the “network state” and seasteading have hatched an escape doctrine for digital aristocrats. Where Srinivasan conjures blockchain fiefdoms with à la carte citizenship and pay-per-view police forces, Thiel pines for oceanic platforms where the wealthy might float beyond government reach, their libertarian fantasies bobbing like luxury yachts in international waters.

Elsewhere, Silicon Valley’s solutionist overdose has inflated an ideas bubble that rivals its financial ones—a frothy marketplace where grand narratives appreciate faster than stock options. Thus, Sam Altman casually drafts planetary blueprints for AI (non-)regulation and even AI welfare (“capitalism for everyone!”), while crypto acolytes (Marc Andreessen, David Sacks), aspiring celestial colonizers (Musk, Bezos), and nuclear revivalists (Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Altman) offer their own grandiose, exciting solutions to problems of seemingly unknown origin. (Who’s guzzling up all this energy we suddenly need so badly? A true mystery, this.)

But more mundane subjects, from foreign policy to defense, increasingly preoccupy them too. Eric Schmidt—a man whose personality could be mistaken for a blank Google Doc—has not only penned two books with Henry Kissinger but also regularly contributes to Foreign Affairs and other such factories of doom and dogma. And he is after big, meaty subjects, the kind that demand somber nods at think-tank luncheons. “Ukraine is losing the drone war” proclaims a piece of his from January 2024. Could this be – a pure coincidence, surely – the same Eric Schmidt, who, just months earlier, launched a drone company?

More here.

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Amber Dance in Smithsonian:

Back in 2014, a woman with advanced cancer pushed Adrienne Boire’s scientific life in a whole new direction. The cancer, which had begun in the breast, had found its way into the patient’s spinal fluid, rendering the middle-aged mother of two unable to walk. “When did this happen?” she asked from her hospital bed. “Why are the cells growing there?” Why, indeed. Why would cancer cells migrate to the spinal fluid, far from where they’d been birthed, and how did they manage to thrive in a liquid so strikingly poor in nutrients? Boire, a physician-scientist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, decided that those questions deserved answers.

The answers are urgent, because the same thing that happened to Boire’s patient is happening to increasing numbers of cancer patients. As the ability to treat initial, or primary, tumors has improved, people survive early rounds with cancer only to come back years or decades later when the cancer has somehow resettled in a new tissue, such as brain, lung or bone. This is metastatic cancer, and it’s the big killer—while precise numbers are scarce, anywhere from half to the large majority of cancer deaths have been attributed to metastasis. Offering people more options and hope will mean understanding how those cancers successfully migrate and recolonize.

The prevalence of metastasis belies the arduous journey that cancer cells must make to achieve it.

More here.

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Jill Lepore in The New York Times:

Four years ago, I made a series for the BBC in which I located the origins of Mr. Musk’s strange sense of destiny in science fiction, some of it a century old. This year, revising the series, I was again struck by how little of what Mr. Musk proposes is new and by how many of his ideas about politics, governance and economics resemble those championed by his grandfather Joshua Haldeman, a cowboy, chiropractor, conspiracy theorist and amateur aviator known as the Flying Haldeman. Mr. Musk’s grandfather was also a flamboyant leader of the political movement known as technocracy.

Leading technocrats proposed replacing democratically elected officials and civil servants — indeed, all of government — with an army of scientists and engineers under what they called a technate. Some also wanted to annex Canada and Mexico. At technocracy’s height, one branch of the movement had more than a quarter of a million members. Under the technate, humans would no longer have names; they would have numbers. One technocrat went by 1x1809x56. (Mr. Musk has a son named X Æ A-12.) Mr. Haldeman, who had lost his Saskatchewan farm during the Depression, became the movement’s leader in Canada. He was technocrat No. 10450-1.

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Why We Need Bodies

A song remains unheard unless it passes
through some body’s throat. This morning
I watched a wren nibble apart a beetle
and digest it into birdsong. Even air needs
loose-leafed trees to express its melancholy.
Everything invisible seeks a shape.

Remember how, in our dizzy younger years,
we tried to pour the abstraction of love
into the pink cup of each other’s mouth?

Now you kneel to tie my shoe (as you’ve done
daily since the stroke) and I telegraph my gratitude
by tapping the nipple mole cuddled in the small
of your back. Nights I slide my fingers
along the lines sloping down your cheek. I flatten
my hand on your chest to check for life
announcing its presence in your heartbeat steady
as a dog tail’s happy thump against the floor.

When I turn over you lightly clasp my left breast
which, for private reasons, you call Freckles.

by Judith Tate O’Brien
from Rattle Magazine #16, Winter 20011

—20

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Eigil zu Tage-Ravn in The Public Domain Review:

It is among the most memorable moments in American literature. At the start of Chapter Three of his masterwork, Moby-Dick (1851), Herman Melville has his protagonist, the existential castaway Ishmael, newly embarked on his fateful commitment to go a-whaling (is it a kind of suicide? a mere lark? both?), push open the door of a port-side rough-house for boozing mariners: the so-called “Spouter-Inn”. It is dark. It is dank. Savage weaponry from cannibal isles spikes the walls. And those who hunker at the bar are renegades and isolatoes, gruff men of the sea. In the half-light, Ishmael immediately discerns, in the entryway itself, like a warning over the threshold, “a very large oil-painting”.

Ishmael pauses. He puzzles. He peers. He even goes so far as to pry open a little window in the vestibule, to shed some light on a most inscrutable, a most intractable, a most maddening canvas: “Such unaccountable masses of shades and shadows, that at first you almost thought some ambitious young artist, in the time of the New England hags, had endeavored to delineate chaos bewitched.”

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Morgan Kelly at the website of Dartmouth:

Dartmouth researchers conducted the first-ever clinical trial of a generative AI-powered therapy chatbot and found that the software resulted in significant improvements in participants’ symptoms, according to results published March 27 in NEJM AI.

People in the study also reported they could trust and communicate with the system, known as Therabot, to a degree that is comparable to working with a mental health professional.

The trial consisted of 106 people from across the United States diagnosed with major depressive disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, or an eating disorder. Participants interacted with Therabot through a smartphone app by typing out responses to prompts about how they were feeling or initiating conversations when they needed to talk.

People diagnosed with depression experienced a 51% average reduction in symptoms, leading to clinically significant improvements in mood and overall well-being, the researchers report. Participants with generalized anxiety reported an average reduction in symptoms of 31%, with many shifting from moderate to mild anxiety, or from mild anxiety to below the clinical threshold for diagnosis.

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Josh Rothman at The New Yorker:

Many people don’t know how seriously to take A.I. It can be hard to know, both because the technology is so new and because hype gets in the way. It’s wise to resist the sales pitch simply because the future is unpredictable. But anti-hype, which emerges as a kind of immune response to boosterism, doesn’t necessarily clarify matters. In 1879, the Times ran a multipart front-page story about the light bulb, under the headline “Edison’s Electric Light—Conflicting Statements as to Its Utility.” In a section offering “a scientific view,” the paper quoted an eminent engineer—the president of the Stevens Institute of Technology—who was “protesting against the trumpeting of the result of Edison’s experiments in electric lighting as ‘a wonderful success.’ ” He wasn’t being unreasonable: inventors had been failing to construct workable light bulbs for decades. In many other instances, his anti-hype would’ve been warranted.

A.I. hype has created two kinds of anti-hype. The first holds that the technology will soon plateau: maybe A.I. will continue struggling to plan ahead, or to think in an explicitly logical, rather than intuitive, way.

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