Richard Kreitner in The Nation:
Let’s be frank: It’s a somewhat presumptuous name for a magazine. Adopting it may have been akin to what philosophers refer to as a “speech act,” meant to call into being the very thing referred to. Largely absent from pre–Civil War political rhetoric, which more often spoke of “the union” or “the republic,” the word nation appeared five times in Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 Gettysburg Address. Two years later, when the first issue rolled off the presses in July 1865, the Confederacy had been defeated and Lincoln murdered, and a fierce fight over whether the “nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” would indeed see “a new birth of freedom” was just beginning. The Nation was founded to see that struggle through—and we will.
By the 1920s, there was still something a little incongruous in a magazine so named devoting hundreds of pages over three years to an extensive meditation on each of the separate states. Penned by some of the most illustrious writers of the period—W.E.B. Du Bois on Georgia, Edmund Wilson on New Jersey, Sherwood Anderson on Ohio, Willa Cather on Nebraska, H.L. Mencken on Maryland, Sinclair Lewis on Minnesota, Theodore Dreiser on Indiana—the essays in that series, “These United States,” explored the rich history, geography, and character of those minor subdivisions supposedly effaced by the Civil War. The country was often depicted as “one vast and almost uniform republic,” the editors observed in an introductory note in 1922. But that left out what made American life interesting: “What riches of variety remain among its federated commonwealths? What distinctive colors of life among its many sections and climates and altitudes?”
In perusing the following dispatches from “These Dis-United States,” as we’re calling the series this time around, you may well be struck by how similar the experiences of this moment are in many states across this bruised and battered land.
More here.
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The best measure of serenity may be our distance from the self — getting far enough to dim the glare of ego and quiet the din of the mind, with all its ruminations and antagonisms, in order to see the world more clearly, in order to hear more clearly our own inner voice, the voice that only ever speak of love.
When Jeanne Calment died at the age of 122, her 
I came to all
In matters of style
The annual Berggruen Prize Essay Competition seeks to stimulate new thinking and innovative concepts while embracing cross-cultural perspectives across fields, disciplines, and geographies. By posing fundamental philosophical questions of significance for both contemporary life and for the future, the competition will serve as a complement to the Berggruen Prize for Philosophy & Culture, which recognizes major lifetime achievements in advancing ideas that have shaped the world.
At the turn of the 20th century, the renowned mathematician David Hilbert had a grand ambition to bring a more rigorous, mathematical way of thinking into the world of physics. At the time, physicists were still plagued by debates about basic definitions — what is heat? how are molecules structured? — and Hilbert hoped that the formal logic of mathematics could provide guidance.
As I’ve learned more about what the future of AI might look like, I’ve come to better appreciate the real dangers that this technology poses. There were always two ways in which AI could be misused. The first is happening now: AI technologies like deep fakes are already widely in circulation. My Instagram feed is full of videos of things I am sure never happened like catastrophic building collapses or MAGA celebrities explaining how wrong they were. It is, however, nearly impossible to verify whether or not they are real. This kind of manipulation is going to further undermine trust in institutions and exacerbate polarization. There are plenty of other malign uses to which sophisticated AI can be put, like raiding your bank account and launching devastating cyber-attacks on basic infrastructure. Bad actors are everywhere.
IF THE CHOICE were up to Zimbabwe, it would pursue a path independent of South Africa, the powerful and domineering neighbor across the Limpopo River to its south. Yet, because of fate, history, and the accidents of geography, the most significant forces that shaped modern Zimbabwe and its predecessor, Southern Rhodesia, came from across the frontier. In the 1820s, a fugitive general named Mzilikazi, fleeing the Zulu warrior-king Shaka, crossed the border from present-day KwaZulu-Natal (on the southeast Indian Ocean coast), where he would found the Ndebele state. In 1890 came the colonial encroachment by British–South African empire man Cecil John Rhodes, after whom the country was named. Zimbabwe and South Africa share in Rhodes a common ancestor; in Ndebele a language with a close connection to Zulu (the most spoken language in South Africa); and the common visual vocabulary sometimes called Ndebele art.
The discovery began, as many breakthroughs do, with an observation that didn’t quite make sense. In 1948, two French researchers, Paul Mandel and Pierre Métais, published a little-noticed paper in a scientific journal. Working in a laboratory in Strasbourg, they had been cataloguing the chemical contents of blood plasma—that river of life teeming with proteins, sugars, waste, nutrients, and cellular debris. Amid this familiar inventory, they’d spotted an unexpected presence: fragments of DNA drifting freely.
The team used reprogrammed stem cells to grow human organoids of the gut, liver and brain in a dish. Shen says the researchers then injected the organoids into the amniotic fluid of female mice carrying early-stage embryos. “We didn’t even break the embryonic wall” to introduce the cells to the embryos, says Shen. The female mice carried the embryos to term.
Yet it’s futile to deny that the impulse to self-sufficiency – to economic unsociability – also reaches very deep into our psyches and our history. What’s most striking about autarky is its adaptability as a programme and an ideology. It can appeal impressively across seemingly opposing political, social and ideological lines. It’s been adopted, at various times, by political movements on the Left and the Right, by believers and atheists, by nationalists and cosmopolitans, by fascists and communists, by rich states and poor states, by imperial powers and the colonised, by environmentalists and industrialists. It can be justified by the objective of peace or the demands of war. Any unit – from the individual, to the household, to the village, to the city, to the nation – can apparently aspire to self-sufficiency. It can be borne of a backward-looking nostalgia – a desire to turn the clock back or preserve the status quo – or of a belief that it’s a progressive and necessary programme to build the future. Like a historical El Niño weather pattern, the drive for self-sufficiency keeps returning, unpredictably but, also, seemingly inevitably.
Dear Reader,