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Ritchie Robertson at Literary Review:

Unsuccessful in politics and war, Augustus turned to culture. He transformed Dresden into a city which, even after the notorious bombing raid of February 1945, is still handsome. The highlights include the Zwinger, a palace complex that served as a setting for festivities, the Frauenkirche and the 437-metre-long Augustus Bridge, which linked the centre with the New Town on the other side of the Elbe, helping to create an integrated urban landscape. Next door to the Zwinger, Augustus built the largest opera house in Germany. Blanning enthuses about his success in attracting architects, artists and musicians to Saxony, the most famous being Johann Sebastian Bach, who arrived in Leipzig, Saxony’s other main city, in 1723. 

Augustus was determined to outshine other Baroque rulers in the scale and splendour of the festivities he staged. In 1719, his only legitimate son, Frederick Augustus, married Archduchess Maria Josepha of Austria, daughter of the recently deceased Emperor Joseph I.

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Beer Bottle

In the burned-
out highway
ditch the throw-

away beer
bottle lands
standing up

unbroken,
like a cat
thrown off

of a roof
to kill it,
landing hard

and dazzled
in the sun,
right side up;

sort of a
miracle

by Ted Kooser
from Strong Measures
Harper Collins, 1986

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Brooks Riley in Art at First Sight:

A painting is not something we step into. We might crave a landscape, a room, a street, a scene or a background, but we can’t inhabit the painter’s vision of it. Our eyes inch closer as they focus on areas of the work, but the view stops there: We remain outsiders, left out in the cold.

Nowhere have I felt this as much as in the 10^th century Southern Tang era painted scroll The Night Revels of Han Xizai, a work I fell in love with for a special reason: I wanted to be there. I wanted to step inside that painted scroll and move among the participants in the low intimate light of a nighttime gathering—joining what looked to be a mondain salon where socializing was stirred with art and music as the guests sipped tea and other beverages, sat around an ancient booth designed for lively conversation, plopped casually on a king-sized daybed, arm propped on bended knee (a sitting pose I recognize from an old friend), or joined in the music-making with percussion or flute.

There is so much going on in this scroll—a 12^th-century copy of the original by Gu Hongzhong—only some of it mysterious.

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Dario Amodei at his own website:

I think and talk a lot about the risks of powerful AI. The company I’m the CEO of, Anthropic, does a lot of research on how to reduce these risks. Because of this, people sometimes draw the conclusion that I’m a pessimist or “doomer” who thinks AI will be mostly bad or dangerous. I don’t think that at all. In fact, one of my main reasons for focusing on risks is that they’re the only thing standing between us and what I see as a fundamentally positive future. I think that most people are underestimating just how radical the upside of AI could be, just as I think most people are underestimating how bad the risks could be.

In this essay I try to sketch out what that upside might look like—what a world with powerful AI might look like if everything goes right. Of course no one can know the future with any certainty or precision, and the effects of powerful AI are likely to be even more unpredictable than past technological changes, so all of this is unavoidably going to consist of guesses. But I am aiming for at least educated and useful guesses, which capture the flavor of what will happen even if most details end up being wrong. I’m including lots of details mainly because I think a concrete vision does more to advance discussion than a highly hedged and abstract one.

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Jennifer M Morton in Aeon:

Alongside equality, freedom and opportunity, fear has long played a powerful role in political discourse. In ordinary life, fear is often a fitting response to danger. If you encounter a snake while out on a hike, fear will lead you to back away and exercise caution. If the snake is poisonous, fear will have saved your life. By contrast, the fears that dominate political discourse are less concrete. We are told to fear elites, terrorists, religious zealots, godless atheists, sexists, feminists, Marxists and the enemies of democracy. Yet even as these purported poisons are less obviously lethal, political rhetoricians have long understood that making them salient is a powerful way to shape citizens’ motivations. As Donald Trump told Bob Woodward: real power is fear.

It is tempting to think that political fear is largely manufactured – a cynical ploy to manipulate the masses. Trump’s dark vision of the United States would seem to be a prime example of this. Yet, fear can be fitting in politics. Citizens face real dangers from failed political leadership, as lethal to our livelihood as snake bites.

Thomas Hobbes, the 17th-century political philosopher, understood fear.

More here.

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Yasemin Saplakoglu in Quanta Magazine:

Around 2,500 years ago, Babylonian traders in Mesopotamia impressed two slanted wedges into clay tablets. The shapes represented a placeholder digit, squeezed between others, to distinguish numbers such as 50, 505 and 5,005. An elementary version of the concept of zero was born.

Hundreds of years later, in seventh-century India, zero took on a new identity. No longer a placeholder, the digit acquired a value and found its place on the number line, before 1. Its invention went on to spark historic advances in science and technology. From zero sprang the laws of the universe, number theory and modern mathematics. “Zero is, by many mathematicians, definitely considered one of the greatest — or maybe the greatest — achievement of mankind,” said the neuroscientist Andreas Nieder(opens a new tab), who studies animal and human intelligence at the University of Tübingen in Germany. “It took an eternity until mathematicians finally invented zero as a number.”

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Shelly Fan in Singularity Hub:

For the first time, an off-the-shelf CAR T cell therapy has been used to treat potentially life-threatening autoimmune disorders in three people. With a single shot, the treatment rapidly reversed their debilitating symptoms for up to a year. The treatment changed one recipient’s life. Diagnosed with systemic sclerosis—an autoimmune condition that wrecked his muscles and joints—the 57-year-old man, who the study identifies by his last name, Gong, regained his life just two weeks after the injection. He could move the muscles around his mouth to smile. His fingers again danced across a keyboard at work.

After a year, he told Nature, “I feel very good.”

Gong is part of an ongoing clinical trial to genetically reprogram healthy donor cells into a universal “living drug.” The trial, set to end in 2025, could upend current interventions for untreatable autoimmune disorders. These life-long diseases are mostly managed, but not cured, with immunosuppressant drugs. Though helpful, the medications drastically lower a person’s ability to battle infectious diseases, making it hard to fight off bacterial or viral attacks.

More here.

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Seyla Benhabib in Boston Review:

I first arrived in Frankfurt, in this city of immigrants and exiles, in the fall of 1980, as a foreign student and scholar whose life was forever changed by her encounter with it. In Frankfurt I met brilliant friends and scholars from all over the world who gathered in Jürgen Habermas’s “Doktoranden-Kolloquium” on Monday evenings in the old Department of Philosophy on Dantestrasse—alas, a building which no longer exists! In Frankfurt, I also learned about many famous intellectuals whose lives intersected for various periods in this city of migrants, among them none other than Hannah Arendt and Theodor Adorno.

Any consideration of Arendt and Adorno as thinkers who share intellectual affinities is likely to be thwarted from the start by the profound dislike which Arendt in particular seems to have borne towards Adorno. In 1929 Adorno was among members of the faculty of the University of Frankfurt who would be evaluating Arendt’s first husband Günther Anders’s habilitation. Adorno found the work unsatisfactory, thus bringing to an end Anders’s hopes for a university career. It is also in this period that Arendt’s notorious statement regarding Adorno—“Der kommt uns nicht ins Haus,” meaning that Adorno was not to set foot in their apartment in Frankfurt—was uttered.

This hostility on Arendt’s part never diminished, while Adorno encountered it with a cultivated politesse. Arendt’s temper flared up several more times at Adorno: first, when she was wrongly convinced that Adorno and his colleagues were preventing the publication of Walter Benjamin’s posthumous manuscripts, and secondly, when Adorno’s critique of Heidegger—The Jargon of Authenticity—appeared in 1964.

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Camilo Ruiz Tassinari in Phenomenal World:

Lopezobradorismo is without a doubt the most significant political movement to have emerged in Mexico over the past three decades. Since 2018, it has reconstituted the country’s post-authoritarian political system. The movement’s new leader, Claudia Sheinbaum won the Presidency with 60 percent of the votes in early June. With a two-thirds majority in both houses of Congress, the Movement for National Regeneration (Morena) will have the power to completely rewrite the country’s constitutional compact.

The reach of Morena’s popularity—leading twenty-two out of thirty-two states with its allies—is astounding. For twenty years, Mexican politics was a three way game between the National Action Party (PAN) on the center-right, the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) on the center-left, and a shape-shifting Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) which had ruled the country for most of the twentieth century. During those two decades presidents seldom had a majority in congress and any constitutional change required corrupt bargains between the parties’ grandees. That game is now over: the PRD has practically disappeared, the PRI has hollowed out as most of its leaders moved to Morena, and the PAN has shrunk into a local organization of socially conservative families in the Catholic center-north. Morena has gained more electoral support than any party throughout the country’s quarter century of democracy.

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Sanjay G Reddy over at reddytoread:

When I first encountered the ideas central to the winners of this year’s three Nobel Prize in Economics around two and a half decades ago I was startled. The excessive economy of their framework for understanding a complex global reality combined with a set of premises that looked starkly ideological. Despite the time that has passed, the reams that have been written, and the imprimatur these ideas have now received, these charges remain pertinent.

The point of view of the authors remains narrowly focused – even fixated – on property rights, seeing them as defining inclusive economic institutions and as underpinning inclusive political institutions, the coupled concepts at the center of their understanding of Why Nations Fail, the sizable volume in which two of the authors elaborated and extended their view. It is understandable that this perspective enjoys a resonance among property holders and enthusiasts, both in the economic discipline and more broadly in society, as it is reflection of a common sense that prevails in such quarters, but it provides an inadequate guide to understanding either democracy or development. This is because property rights play more diverse and ambivalent roles in both phenomena than they acknowledge. Their view is ahistorical. It misses essential aspects of the colonial experience (such as the impact of ethnic and racial prejudices and solidarities based on the global color line) and its resulting legacies. It also misunderstands the sources of success of rising nations in the contemporary world, such as the role of developmental states.

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Adam Frank in Noema:

“Today is not your first arrival here.” — Hongzhi Zhengjue, 1091-1157 CE

Across 15,000 generations, human beings have looked out at the sentinel stars and felt the pressing weight of myriad existential questions: Are we alone? Are there other planets also orbiting distant suns? If so, have any of these other worlds also birthed life, or is the drama of our Earth a singular cosmic accident? And what about other minds and civilizations? Have others in the universe, through their success as tool-builders and world-makers, also brought themselves to the brink of collapse?

Remarkably, the first answers to these questions are beginning to arrive. Just as Copernicus reimagined the architecture of our solar system five centuries ago, we are once again in a revolution that pivots on planets. A new science called astrobiology has changed the night sky. It already shows us that nearly every star in the galaxy hosts a family of worlds. Using powerful new instruments and theoretical methods, we’re also learning how to search these distant worlds for alien biospheres. In this way, across the next few decades, we might finally gain answers to the ancient question of our place among life, planets and the cosmos.

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Ramin Skibba in Undark:

In Amrith’s view, all history is environmental history. And that includes both environmental effects on societies and those societies’ impacts on the environment. He cites evidence, for example, suggesting that a “medieval warm period” spanned most of Europe and parts of North America and western Asia through the 13th century. The period’s benign climate and rainfall, he argues, allowed societies to clear land, expand cultivation, build cities, and grow their populations. He also assesses the rise and fall of the Mongols, who swept across Asia quickly before being thwarted by limited grasses for their horses, intense snowstorms and earthquakes, and deadly plagues that the Mongolian expansion helped spread.

In his analysis, the colonial expansions of the 15th through the early 20th centuries transformed the global distribution of power and wealth while devastating both Indigenous populations and the natural world through deforestation and other ecological harms.

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The Old Days

In the old days of the old God, demanding and full of blame,
there was such commerce between heaven and earth—
burning bushes, angels knocking at the door, high drama
at the Red Sea. But after centuries, tired and overwhelmed,
God moved into a book with black frayed covers;
this book lived in our shul. And so my mother
rose to the occasion—she was the one who warmed cold
waters, parted them, pinched my cheek, made my bed.
Now she’s like God, helpless and confused,
the miracles of Egypt are lost, like her recipes and opinions.
Here she would say, drink this, it’s good for you;
here, this way, and my hands would tie a shoe.

God and my mother have grown to resemble each other,
like a couple who’ve lived under the same roof
for a long time. And both seem to have forgotten me —
He spinning the world, she rinsing the dishes,
remote and distracted, the two of them moving, morning
and night, in little circles of water and air.

by Gene Zeiger
from Leaving Egypt
White Pine Press, Fredonia, NY, 1995

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Elisa Gabbert in the Georgia Review:

I think of an essay as a realm for both the writer and the reader. When I’m working on an essay, I’m entering a loosely defined space. If we borrow Alexander’s terms again, the essay in progress is “the site”: “It is essential to work on the site,” he writes, in A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction; “Work on the site, stay on the site, let the site tell you its secrets.” Just by beginning to think about an essay as such—by forming the intention to write on an idea or theme—I’m opening a portal, I’m creating a site, a realm. It’s a place where all my best thinking can go for a period of time, a place where the thoughts can be collected and arranged for more density of meaning. This place necessarily has structure, if it feels like a place. There’s a classic architecture book called Why Buildings Stand Up. We call any building, or part of a building, or thing like a building, a structure, if it succeeds in standing up. The structure is the system of elements in the building that make things go up—the load-bearing elements, walls and beams and columns, that counteract gravity. They counteract quote-unquote nothing, so empty space becomes a place.

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