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.

More here.

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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.”

More here.

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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.

More here.

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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.

more here.

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Matt Lutz at Humean Being:

So Trump’s basic starting point is that he thinks trade deficits are bad. They’re not, but he thinks they are. He has this very dumb idea that a trade deficit is a deficit of trade, and the dollar amount of the trade deficit is the amount that other countries are cheating us out of through nefarious… I dunno, trading?

So his solution to this injustice is to try to inflict an equal and opposite amount of damage to the other country’s economy. If they’re taking X dollars from us in trade deficit, we’ll take X dollars from them in tariffs. And that’s precisely what the formula is supposed to do. The other country is stealing X dollars from us (per the trade deficit), so we’ll take X dollars right back (with a tariff).

So, a toy example: Suppose that there is another country that we import $100 of goods from and export $21 of goods to. That’s a trade deficit of $79.

More here.  And more on this from Noah Smith here.

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Lucy Moore at Literary Review:

Today we think of Josephine Baker as the personification of the Jazz Age – the skinny black kid from Missouri who took Paris by storm. In retrospect, her show-stopping Revue Nègre act can be read as a subversion of the prejudices of her age. At the time, however, it just looked like a heady cocktail of comedy, exoticism and sex. Scantily garlanded with feathers, dancing to ‘barbaric, syncopated music’, Baker was ‘black poetry’, according to Marcel Sauvage, who acted as her ghostwriter.

The fact that she had got to Paris at all was testament to her resilience and spirit. Born into poverty in St Louis in 1906, Baker never knew who her real father was. By the age of eight she was working as a maid. At eleven, she witnessed the devastating racist violence of the East St Louis massacre. Two years later, having dropped out of school, she was scraping together a living dancing on street corners. She was married – the first time at only thirteen – and divorced twice before she was twenty.

more here.

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Norman Doidge in Tablet:

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Hannah Thomasy in The Scientist:

In 2015, scientists made a surprising discovery about physiologically normal human skin: More than 25 percent of cells carried genetic mutations known to cause cancer and the average number of mutations per cell was similar to the burden observed in many tumors.¹ This research demonstrated that while genetic mutations are critical drivers of cancer development, other factors also play key roles. Indeed, scientists are increasingly finding that epigenetic factors, which do not change the genetic code but can drastically alter gene expression, are important for cancer risk and resilience as well.

More here.

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Metropolis with Ghazal

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