Carl Zimmer in the New York Times:

If you’ve ever cooed at a baby, you have participated in a very special experience. Indeed, it’s an all but unique one: Whereas humans constantly chatter to their infants, other apes hardly ever do so, a new study reveals.

“It’s a new feature that has evolved and massively expanded in our species,” said Johanna Schick, a linguist at the University of Zurich and an author of the study. And that expansion, Dr. Schick and her colleagues argue, may have been crucial to the evolution of language.

Other mammals can bark, meow, roar and hoot. But no other species can use a set of sounds to produce words, nor build sentences with those words to convey an infinite variety of meaning. To trace the origin of our gift of language, researchers often study apes, our closest living relatives.

More here.

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Robert Bellafiore in The New Atlantis:

From Washington, D.C. to Silicon Valley, champions of new technologies often argue, with good reason, that we must embrace them because, if we don’t, the Chinese will — and then where will we be?

Driven by geopolitical pressures to accelerate technological development, particularly in AI and biotech, we seem to have two options: channeling innovation toward humane ends or protecting ourselves against competitors abroad.

To appreciate the difficulty of this choice, we should take a page from military theorists who have wrestled with what is known as the “security dilemma.” Even though it is one of the most important concepts in international relations, it has been given little attention by those grappling with the promises and challenges of new technologies. But we should, because when we apply its core insights to technological development, we realize that achieving a prosperous human future will be even more difficult than we tend to think.

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Martin Jay at Salmagundi:

Leftists argued, with considerable justification, that the MAGAworld response to neo-liberalism was little more than scapegoating where, to cite the Marxist geographer David Harvey, you “blame immigrants, foreign competition, in other words you blame everything except the underlying problems of capital because that is something which you’re allowed to talk about.” But in addition to these diversionary strategies, Trump won his second term in office promising to raise tariffs, bring manufacturing back to America, and defy international economic institutions. Despite his reassurances to powerful corporations that their profits would continue to grow, he managed to convince a sufficient number of aggrieved anti-globalist voters that he was on their side in the battle against unaccountable, unelected elites who sought to run the world on their terms.

Anti-elitism itself became a general rallying cry for MAGA voters, who resented the political and cultural power of those on the coasts and in the mainstream media with fancy college degrees and cosmopolitan disdain for rural and small town America. Although they rarely cited it, C. Wright Mills’ leftist classic, The Power Elite, published in 1956, already targeted the stranglehold that a loose coalition of federal government, large corporations and military leaders, had on ordinary citizens.

more here.

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Jonathan Lethem at The Current:

It starts with a gun, a hand, a staircase, a clock. A woman descends the stairs at the sound of a shot. A policeman, we are soon to learn, has committed suicide, but the behavior of his fresh-minted widow is coolly utilitarian. She conceals his suicide note, and telephones criminals, rather than police; her call results in further calls, by criminals, to further criminals. The telephone in The Big Heat (1953) will be more than a conveyor of bad news, though it is always that. The opening sequence of calls announces an instant metonym for a power network of dubious alliances stringing a city and civilization together. The mode is one that would have been familiar by 1953: the collective expressive atmosphere that would come to be called “noir”—one that this film’s director, Fritz Lang, had famously helped to invent. We are secure in the company of a master of cinematic evidence-gathering: the exacting hand and the pitiless eye of Lang—the most accomplished, imperious, and notorious of the contingent of German émigré directors in 1930s Hollywood.

Lang fled the Nazis in 1933, arriving first in Paris, where (like Vladimir Nabokov) he created one French-language work before crossing the Atlantic to make a life’s creative home in exile. His recruitment to the American studio system was news: Germany’s most prominent director arrived trailing fame, his stylized science-fiction epic Metropolis (1927) among the most legendary of silent films, his M (1931) enshrined as a modernist masterwork of the early sound era.

more here.

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Tamar Haspel in The Washington Post:

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Pike

I take it he doesn’t think at all,
But muscles his slippery fight, an engine
Green deep, powering his belly flash
In his water mother, his horizonless well;
The hooked gill the fault in the world
Of his will, his preying paradise.
Near enough to net I have him,
And the murk of his body is my fear
Of our meeting somehow equally.
He pauses on the strain of my line;
I have him netted, sluicing the air,
How pure and brave my wet thrasher, my enemy.

by John Bruce
from Canadian Poetry Online

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Cecilia Padilla-Iglesias in Sapiens:

If you ask a BaYaka Forager in the Central African rainforest, “Where do you live?,” they often reply with a question of their own: “Mouanga or Pela?”

You’ll get the same response for nearly any question about their lives: Who do you live with? Who is this camp’s leader? How do you mourn the dead?

“Mouanga or Pela?”—meaning, “dry or wet season?” The BaYaka’s social world shifts throughout the year. The location and size of their homes, the materials used to build them, leadership, funerals—all transform depending on the season.

As an evolutionary anthropologist working with the BaYaka, I initially presumed people simply adjusted because of the seasonal availability of different foods. But their changes extended way beyond sustenance into the realms of politics, economics, rituals, and relationships.

More here.

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Andrew Eckholm at n+1:

The narrative premises of Hong Sangsoo’s films tend to be simple. A chance encounter on the street. A quick trip to a nearby town. A man walks into a bar. Where the films of a director like, say, his countryman Bong Joon-Ho unfold through the exposition of a concept, Hong’s films are not built around ideas. The plot is not contained in the premise. Instead, he presents you with a place, an actor, a situation. From there the movie proceeds with an aleatory nimbleness, noticing details—a repeated gesture, a revealing bit of dialogue—that accumulate to reveal the characters and story. The director’s camera technique is likewise simple: extraordinarily long, single-shot, carefully composed scenes of people, often drunk at a table and trending toward conflict; roving zooms and pans, more likely to settle on a listener than a speaker; opening or concluding camera drifts that call attention to some stray object, animal, or landscape feature.

The 64-year-old South Korean director—who to date has made thirty-four films—is probably most famed for his lightweight production methods.

more here.

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Jennifer Ouellette at Ars Technica:

Today marks the 50th anniversary of Jaws, Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster horror movie based on the bestselling novel by Peter Benchley. We’re marking the occasion with a tribute to this classic film and its enduring impact on the popular perception of sharks, shark conservation efforts, and our culture at large.

(Many spoilers below.)

Jaws tells the story of Chief Martin Brody (Roy Scheider), the new police chief for Amity Island, a New England beach town and prime summer tourist attraction. But that thriving industry is threatened by a series of shark attacks, although the local mayor, Larry Vaughn (Murray Hamilton), initially dismisses the possibility, ridiculing the findings of visiting marine biologist Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss). The attacks keep escalating and the body count grows, until the town hires a grizzled shark hunter named Quint (Robert Shaw) to hunt down and kill the great white shark, with the help of Brody and Hooper.

Benchley wrote his novel after reading about a sports fisherman named Frank Mundus, who captured a very large shark in 1964; in fact, the character of Quint is loosely based on Mundus.

More here.

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Anthony Madrid at the Paris Review:

Everybody likes ghazals. Or they do when they learn what they are: A ghazal is a poetic form originating in and strongly associated with the Islamic cultural sphere. It is a medieval thing—or what Westerners would call medieval. Many famous Persian poets are famous for their ghazals. Likewise, Arabic poets, Turkish, Urdu … The ready-to-hand comparison is with the Italian sonnet. Ghazals are a lot like that: song length, rhyme heavy, lots of lovey-doveyness, lots of over-the-top cosmic reasoning.

It took forever for modern English-language poets to pick up on the existence of the ghazal, but once the word got out, plenty of smart people started trying to write original ghazals in English, with differing commitments to the formal rules. I’m one of these poets.

This piece is about translation, but it’s also about writing original poetry in one’s own language while following the rules developed for a different language. I want to talk about English ghazals, but (for lots of good reasons) I’m going to start in left field … with haiku.

more here.

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Sarah Jones in New York Magazine:

Mamdani didn’t have Cuomo’s money or institutional support, which may have freed him to run a transformative campaign. He didn’t shy away from his racial and religious identity, or from backing trans rights, or from supporting Palestine, and he didn’t have to because those positions are not inherently at odds with a “kitchen-table” campaign. He ran on affordability and championed meaningful economic proposals like universal child care and baby baskets, plus a rent freeze for regulated apartments. He told the obvious truth, which is that the city is crushing everyone who isn’t rich, and proposed solutions. With the laudatory assistance of Brad Lander, he modeled a new and more collaborative politics in contrast to Cuomo’s narcissism. He took that optimism to the streets and to social media with what seemed like boundless energy, and he redefined pragmatism for a new age in city politics. Maybe it’s radical to let child-care costs drive families out of the city. Maybe it’s Cuomo and his backers who are out of touch with real people.

More here.

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Heidi Ledford in Nature:

Telltale features visible in standard brain images can reveal how quickly a person is ageing, a study of more than 50,000 brain scans has shown¹.

Pivotal features include the thickness of the cerebral cortex — a region that controls language and thinking — and the volume of grey matter that the cerebral cortex contains. These and other characteristics can predict the rate at which a person’s ability to think and remember will decline with age, as well as their risk of frailty, disease and death. Although it’s too soon to use the new results to assess people in the clinic, the test provides advantages over previously reported ageing ‘clocks’ — typically based on blood tests — that purport to measure how fast a person is ageing, says Madhi Moqri, a computational biologist who studies ageing at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts.

More here.

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Katrina Miller in The New York Times:

Take a look at this video of a waiting room. Do you see anything strange?

Perhaps you saw the rug disappear, or the couch pillows transform, or a few ceiling panels evaporate. Or maybe you didn’t. In fact, dozens of objects change in this video, which won second place in the Best Illusion of the Year Contest in 2021. Voting for the latest version of the contest opened on Monday.

Illusions “are the phenomena in which the physical reality is divorced from perception,” said Stephen Macknik, a neuroscientist at SUNY Downstate Health Sciences University in Brooklyn. He helps run the contest with his colleague and spouse, Susana Martinez-Conde, a neuroscientist at the same institution and the primary organizer of the contest.

More here.

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Unhealthy particulates were found throughout the home
—”The Toxic Homes of Los Angeles,” June 24, 2025

Reading the Times

So many things to be afraid of: the space junk of Damocles
orbiting in the troposphere, that worrisome spot
on my friend’s pancreas, the disappearance of the bagel man
& donut lady & farmworker to far-off destinations while the asylum
issues new protocols for the planet. There go the forests & trout streams
of your youth & here comes another blackout, your apartment gone dark
as a fresh coal on the tongue about to be fired like the one the pharaohs
offered Moses–the choice was that or gold, the story goes some angel shoved
his hand toward the coal so he ended up purified, but also stuttering
like the brother I spent my childhood hiding from in my father’s closet
below rows of suit coats, next to the electric buffer for his shoes. The buffers
were soft wool, & my brother the wolf raged through the house
like a man with a custom power tool through a federal grant program.
If Jesus saves, he must be saving up for something big, waiting for the last
possible moment which is what hardcore evangelicals think I guess but
those people really terrify me. In the City of Angels, chloride anions
in the light fixtures, cyanide in the sofas & baseboards & benzine in the air
while in the city of St. Francis, at sunset, a jobless man casts his line
from a dock to feed his family with fish that will kill them, hauling up bass
& white sturgeon from the shining blameless waters of the bay.

by Kim Addonizio
from Rattle Magazine

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