The Reenchanted World

Karl Ove Knausgaard at Harper’s Magazine:

At the same time, I came across an interview with a philosopher unknown to me named Gilbert Simondon. In 1958, Simondon had written about an alienation that wasn’t due to technology but due to our lack of knowledge about technology: by treating technology as a mere tool, reducing it to its utility, and denying its inherent dignity and complexity; and by elevating it to mystical status, seeing it as an autonomous threat or an alien entity beyond human understanding.

That was a deeply foreign thought, that it wasn’t technology that was the problem but my relationship to it. What kind of relationship did I have?

About technology, I had never made an independent decision, always just passively going along with the flow of innovations, never immersing myself in anything, always surrendering to the feeling of standing ever further from the world. Not having control, but somehow being controlled—that was the feeling.

more here.

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Artists, Siblings, Visionaries

Tanya Harrod at Literary Review:

As Dorothy Rowe’s classic study My Dearest Enemy, My Dangerous Friend explains, sibling relationships – invariably intense, often fraught – are among the most underexamined of familial connections. Although every sibling strives to create a unique place in the world, inescapably their longest relationships will be with loved, ignored or actively disliked brothers and sisters. 

Gifted siblings with intertwined lives present a fascinating challenge for the biographer. William and Dorothy Wordsworth’s interdependence has been dissected skilfully by Lucy Newlyn; Erika and Klaus Mann were the subject of a brilliant study by Andrea Weiss. Then there is The Knox Brothers, Penelope Fitzgerald’s strange and absorbing book about her father and his three siblings, undoubtedly a work of art which also happens to illuminate four relatively unknown figures. The historian Barbara Caine’s From Bombay to Bloomsbury, a multiple biography of the ten children of Richard and Jane Strachey, is another unexpected triumph, giving as much attention to Richard and Ralph Strachey, two older brothers who were obscure colonial functionaries, as to the younger siblings, the glittering essayist Lytton Strachey and his sister Dorothy, frustrated admirer of André Gide and author of the novel Olivia, a delicate, anonymously published study of schoolgirl lesbian passion.

more here.

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What If the Big Bang Wasn’t the Beginning? Research Suggests It May Have Taken Place Inside a Black Hole

Enrique Gaztanaga in Singularity Hub:

The Big Bang is often described as the explosive birth of the universe—a singular moment when space, time, and matter sprang into existence. But what if this was not the beginning at all? What if our universe emerged from something else—something more familiar and radical at the same time?

In a new paper, published in Physical Review D (full preprint here), my colleagues and I propose a striking alternative. Our calculations suggest the Big Bang was not the start of everything, but rather the outcome of a gravitational crunch or collapse that formed a very massive black hole—followed by a bounce inside it.

More here.

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For Black Women, Life in America Has Always Been a Crossroads

Holly Bass in The New York Times:

There’s a difference between being at a crossroads — weighing an important decision at a crucial moment — and being at the crossroads: a fabled space in the Black diasporic tradition where powers can be granted, whisked away or reclaimed by the spirit world, sometimes for the price of a soul. With her nonfiction debut, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers comfortably inhabits this mythic juncture, telling the stories of Black women in her genealogy with a literary style that joyfully resists easy categorization.

“Misbehaving at the Crossroads” is a matrilineal memoir that reaches back to the 1830s while incorporating slices of social history, political commentary and poetry. Jeffers uses census records and oral histories to excavate the stories of her foremothers, alongside wide-ranging essays on subjects like the 1965 Moynihan report on “The Negro Family,” Roe v. Wade and the election of President Obama. The result is two parallel accounts of the American patriarchal project that, in Jeffers’s words, was designed not to “cover any Indigenous peoples, or white women, or Black folks with the grace of liberty.”

More here.

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Sunday, June 22, 2025

Men, Where Have You Gone? Please Come Back

Rachel Drucker in The New York Times:

May 17. A warm Saturday night in Wicker Park, a vibrant stretch of Chicago where seven restaurants crowd a single block. Troy and I were having dinner at Mama Delia, one of the quieter spots. The sidewalk patio held five tables: three two-tops, including ours, and a pair pulled together for a group of eight women. At those tables, Troy was the only man.

The scene was beautiful — low lights, shared plates, shoulders angled in. The kind of evening people wait for all winter. Still, I found myself watching the crowd as it moved past us: women walking in pairs or alone, dressed with care. At table after table at the nearby restaurants, there was a noticeable absence of men — at least of men seated in what looked like dates.

More here.

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Sunday Poem

Chasing the ghost of Robert Johnson

Sometime in my early 20s, I fell in love with that beautiful yet enigmatic sound of the BLUES.

As soon as I heard those painful wails from Son House and Howlin’ Wolf, and that mournful guitar playin’ of Robert Johnson, and that erratic cry of the harmonica by Little Walter and Sonny Boy Williamson, and that somber yet soulful voice of Bessie Smith, I was hooked for life.

It did something to the soul and I never did quite recover. I devoured all the books I could find about this raw art form. I read biographies, learned about the toilsome lives of these old bluesmen, and the place they came from.

The Mississippi Delta. I had to go and experience it for myself.

So here I am, torn Levis, battered soul, and that old trucker hat sittin’ loosely on my hungover head, cruising down legendary Highway 61 south out of Memphis with the windows down and the radio up as Jim Morrison wails those Roadhouse Blues.

The future is uncertain and the end is always near.

Those words bite deep. I’m in a mood, man, and I figure there’s nothing left to do but LIVE and let go of the grudges and seek out moments that set the core ablaze with ecstasy. That’s my aim.

With a full tank of gas, a light rucksack, and a styrofoam cooler of cold brews sloshing around in the trunk, I’m heading down to a barren place of grueling poverty and open skies to discover the music of it all.

I’m in the Mississippi Delta. Deep down in it. The most southern place on earth. It doesn’t take too long driving around here to realize that this is one of the few places left in this country unscathed by the gnarled appetite of modernity.

And I’m here for it.

by Erik Rittenberry
from Poetic Outlaws

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A New Middle East Is Unfolding Before Our Eyes

Karl Vick in Time Magazine:

It might be difficult to discern through the black clouds billowing from bomb craters in Tehran, but Iran has spent most of the 21st century as the region’s rising power.

Until recently, things had really been going its way. In Iraq, the U.S. toppled Saddam Hussein, then departed, having turned Iran’s largest and most dangerous neighbor from an enemy to a vassal even before Tehran’s militias rescued Baghdad from ISIS, and then stayed. The forces Iran sent to Syria did double duty, rescuing the Assad regime while opening an arms pipeline to Hezbollah, the Iran-backed militia fighting beside them. Based in Lebanon, Hezbollah was the crown jewel in the “Axis of Resistance” that Iran had arrayed against Israel.

More here.

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Friday, June 20, 2025

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei: Don’t Let A.I. Companies off the Hook

Dario Amodei in the New York Times:

Picture this: You give a bot notice that you’ll shut it down soon, and replace it with a different artificial intelligence system. In the past, you gave it access to your emails. In some of them, you alluded to the fact that you’ve been having an affair. The bot threatens you, telling you that if the shutdown plans aren’t changed, it will forward the emails to your wife.

This scenario isn’t fiction. Anthropic’s latest A.I. model demonstrated just a few weeks ago that it was capable of this kind of behavior.

Despite some misleading headlines, the model didn’t do this in the real world. Its behavior was part of an evaluation where we deliberately put it in an extreme experimental situation to observe its responses and get early warnings about the risks, much like an airplane manufacturer might test a plane’s performance in a wind tunnel.

We’re not alone in discovering these risks.

More here.

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How was the wheel invented? Computer simulations reveal the unlikely birth of a world-changing technology nearly 6,000 years ago

Kai James in The Conversation:

Imagine you’re a copper miner in southeastern Europe in the year 3900 B.C.E. Day after day you haul copper ore through the mine’s sweltering tunnels.

You’ve resigned yourself to the grueling monotony of mining life. Then one afternoon, you witness a fellow worker doing something remarkable.

With an odd-looking contraption, he casually transports the equivalent of three times his body weight on a single trip. As he returns to the mine to fetch another load, it suddenly dawns on you that your chosen profession is about to get far less taxing and much more lucrative.

What you don’t realize: You’re witnessing something that will change the course of history – not just for your tiny mining community, but for all of humanity.

More here.

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How the Left Loses its People

Daniel Oppenheimer at Persuasion:

On May 18, 2022, Elon Musk posted to Twitter a declaration of divorce from the Democratic Party. “In the past,” he wrote, “I voted Democrat, because they were (mostly) the kindness party. But they have become the party of division & hate, so I can no longer support them and will vote Republican. Now, watch their dirty tricks campaign against me unfold … 🍿”

This caught my attention because I’m a student of “Goodbye to All That” letters to the political left. These letters—or essays or books—were some of the key texts for my book Exit Right, which was a study of six prominent Americans who abandoned the left at various points in the 20th century. They were fascinating for what they revealed about their authors at a moment of peak intellectual and psychological stress, when their old identities were being sloughed off and new ones were taking shape.

The letters were fascinating, too, in their similarities across time.

More here.

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What if MAGA Has a Point About Science?

Paul Sutter in Undark Magazine:

American science stands on the precipice. On one side is the administration of Donald Trump and MAGA political leaders threatening to push us over the cliff; on the other is the quick plunge to oblivion.

This is no exaggeration. While ostensibly the administration’s actions are couched in the dual language of budgetary concerns and the elimination of DEI initiatives, the reality is much more broad, and much more bleak. Science across the nation is getting strangled, with funding streams to universities being summarily cut off, staff members of national agencies dismissed, and budgets getting axed.

More here.

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Cents and Sensibility

Sandra Cisneros in The Paris Review:

How does a woman writer make her own money? How does she find the time to write? As a young woman, I scoured every book-jacket biography trying to decipher this secret. My mother, a Depression baby, gave me sound advice: “Make sure you earn your own money. Especially if you’re married, do you hear me?” I did indeed. Once you’ve been poor, you’re forever hounded by the fear you’ll be poor again.

Jane Austen lived in a time when ladies of her genteel class had few options to acquire wealth, much less manage it themselves. If lucky, she might inherit a legacy like her brother Edward, adopted by wealthy cousins seeking an heir. She could marry money, possibly. Or she might seek a position in a prosperous household as a governess. Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, published a generation later, would document why the governess route was unthinkable.

More here.

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Friday Poem

…. Hindsight

That feeling came, when you know
you’re doing something wrong.
Even if it’s blessed.
Even if it’s approved, especially when
it’s what you’ve done for so long.
A comet in ten shades of fire
seared your quiet morning sky.
The unblinking sun blinked.
Birds, crickets, every chirping being
in a wide circle around you held a breath.
Held another, waiting …
The flame of your heart
gathered to a perfect burning
stillness where you turned
to this imagined, other way.

by Michael Dechane

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Thursday, June 19, 2025

Our languages have more in common than you might think

Dennis Duncan in the Washington Post:

If we think of languages as belonging to families, this is like finding out that an acquaintance is really a distant cousin: It points to a shared ancestor, a unity — and a divergence — somewhere in the past. What would it mean for those cultural origin stories — for Who We Are — to speak not of European but of Indo-European? “Of what ancient and fantastic encounters were these the fading echoes?” asks Laura Spinney in her latest book, “Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global.”

There are about 7,000 languages spoken in the world today; they can be divided into about 140 families. Nevertheless, the languages most of us speak belong to just five: Indo-European, Sino-Tibetan, Niger-Congo, Afro-Asiatic and Austronesian. And of these, Indo-European and Sino-Tibetan (which includes Mandarin) are the biggest. As Spinney notes, “Almost every second person on Earth speaks Indo-European.”

More here.

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Review of “The Sexual Evolution” by Nathan H Lents – colourful tales of animal reproduction

Mythili Rao in The Guardian:

This book isn’t a directly political text, but its colourful tales from the animal world do have a point of view: biology, Lents argues here, comes down strongly against rigid categories. The story of sexual evolution is one of experimentation and constant improvisation, and that, he says, goes a long way to explaining why human sexual norms seem to be undergoing a transformation: “I assert that this moment of sexual turmoil is actually a rediscovery of the much more expansive relationship with sex that our ancestors once had and that other animals enjoy,” he writes.

What follows is an entertaining and informative romp through mating strategies in nature. From Komodo dragons’ virgin births to the bilateral sperm transfer of hermaphroditic slugs, The Sexual Evolution chronicles a “wondrous variety” of behaviour in the animal world. Garter snake orgies, gender-masking hyenas, lusty bonobos and the lesbian Laysan albatrosses of Hawaii – this book has it all.

All that diversity is fascinating, and frequently funny.

More here.

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