Lydia Davis in Harper’s Magazine:

A person once said to me, “You’re a writer. You must have a lot to say.” He was making an assumption. I’ve thought about his assumption many times. Is it that simple? Do I write because I have a lot to say? I do have a lot to say. No matter how much I have said, isn’t there always more to say? But then, I imagine everyone has a lot to say, writers and nonwriters alike. I can’t imagine anyone not having a lot to say—even if they keep their mouth closed.

Human beings with a lot to say like to make noise. So do crickets, dogs, mice, other insects, rabbits when frightened or being killed, moose, and many, many others. It is impressive to think of all the creatures on earth and all the different noises they make, for different reasons. Some of their noises are effective. Some fail to have an effect.

More here.

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Arifa Akbar in The Guardian:

I can’t remember when I first stopped sleeping soundly. Maybe as a child, in the bedroom I initially shared with my brother, Tariq. I would wait for his breathing to quieten, then strain to listen beyond our room in the hope of being the last one awake, and feel myself expanding into the liberating space and solitude. By my early 20s, that childhood game of holding on to wakefulness while others slept began playing out against my will. Sound seemed to be the trigger. It was as if the silence I had tuned into as a child was now a requirement for sleep. Any sound was noise: the burr of the TV from next door, the ticking of a clock in another room. When one layer of sound reduced its volume, another rose from beneath it, each intrusive and underscored by my own unending thoughts. Noise blaring from without and within, until I felt too tired to sleep.

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Amy Odell in The New York Times:

The end of Anna Wintour’s 37-year run as editor in chief of Vogue was a lot less dramatic than its beginning. Back in 1988, magazines ruled fashion, anointing people and decreeing trends, and it was a cloistered world of high drama and higher expense accounts. When Ms. Wintour was chosen to replace the legendary editor, Grace Mirabella, it was a scandal — Ms. Mirabella learned she was fired from her husband, who called after he saw it on the evening news.

But when Ms. Wintour announced on June 26 that she was relinquishing the role, it felt more like a corporate governance move than a revolution that will shake the entire industry she has ruled over for decades now. For one thing, she retains her job as Vogue’s global editorial director, and will stay on as chief content officer for Condé Nast. It was less her retiring than the retiring of a once-imperial, no longer so powerful title: editor in chief.

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Steven Shapin in the LRB:

ger Penrose​ liked puzzles. In the 1950s, inspired by a catalogue of prints made by the paradoxical Dutch artist M.C. Escher, the young Penrose and his psychiatrist-geneticist father, Lionel, set out to produce drawings of ‘impossible objects’. Pictorial conventions cue us to perceive two-dimensional drawings as representations of three-dimensional things, but these conventions can also be used to deceive – for example, to depict things that could not exist in three dimensions. One of these objects became known as the ‘Penrose triangle’.

The Penroses were a family of puzzlers. Father and sons amused themselves by constructing polyhedra out of wood and cardboard that could be taken apart and put together in interesting ways. Everyone played chess: Lionel set puzzles and his wife, Margaret, like him a qualified physician, was a keen player; Oliver Penrose, Roger’s older brother, is a physicist and a proficient amateur player; and his younger brother, Jonathan, was a grandmaster and ten times British chess champion. But there was much more to Roger’s puzzling than this. People who know little else about what he did may be familiar with the Penrose triangle, which shares space with Escher’s prints on the walls of student bedrooms around the world, or with Penrose tiling – tessellated polygons that can cover an infinite plane without repeating patterns. The triangles and tiles have been taken up by mathematicians interested in algorithms for generating such things, by chemists investigating crystal structure, and by psychologists concerned with the way the mind makes sense of the external world, but for Penrose they were, for the most part, a bit of fun.

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Daniela Gabor in Phenomenal World:

From the turbulent perch of the present, 2015 seems like a lifetime ago. That year, a trifecta of UN agreements announced transformative global ambitions on climate and development. In July 2015, 193 UN Member States agreed to the Addis Ababa Action Plan of the Third International Conference on Financing for Development (FfD3). Solving the financing question, the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon stressed, provided “the foundation of a revitalized global partnership for sustainable development that will leave no one behind.” In September of that year, UN members signed the Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development, a “broad and universal policy agenda” aiming to “transform our world” through a new set of Sustainable Development Goals. Then, the Paris Agreement in December marked a new direction in climate politics. Climate action was no longer synonymous with carbon pricing, but instead a long-term project of economic transformation.

The FfD3, the World Bank reported, was marked by “one stark difference from previous gatherings in Doha and Monterrey: unequivocal acceptance that the financing will have to come from private as well as public resources.” The change was inaugurated in part by the sheer force of a new Bank-created motto for financing development: “From Billions to Trillions.” Public, concessional funding in the billions could unlock trillions in private investment. To meet the aims of the social development goals, the Bank claimed, required trillions in financing, which could only materialize through “a paradigm shift… a financing framework capable of channelling resources and investments of all kinds—public and private, national, and global.” It was music to many ears, eager to hear that trillions of investment only required small amounts of public expenditure.

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Corey Robin in Sidecar:

Late capitalism is an ambiguous term. Lateness may imply death or an ending, as when we speak of my late grandfather or the late afternoon. When the German social theorist Werner Sombart first used the term in the early twentieth century, late capitalism did mean the end of capitalism. Yet ‘late’ in the superlative also suggests up-to-date or state-of-the-art, pointing not to the demise of something but to its refinement and advance. Surveying the same developments as Sombart, the Austrian Marxist Rudolf Hilferding claimed that the emerging economy of the twentieth century was simply ‘the latest phase of capitalist development’, a phrase echoed by Lenin, who took pains to remind his followers that ‘there is no such thing as an absolutely hopeless situation’ for the bourgeoisie.

Despite its popularity in recent years, especially since the 2008 financial crisis and the left-populist insurgencies that followed, late capitalism is not an idea that lends itself to revolution or a vision of progress. It may express a wish to be rid of capitalism. But mostly it works as a theory of turning points that never turn – or worse.

Traditionally, the socialist left has believed that capitalism is prone to crises – not simply the ups and downs of the business cycle but increasingly wrenching dislocations that cannot be resolved within the constraints of the system. With time, these crises must come to an end, ‘either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large’, as the canonical formulation has it, ‘or in the common ruin of the contending classes’. Though hardly a deterministic vision of the future – the ‘common ruin of the contending classes’ is a serious possibility – such a theory of revolution depends on a theory of crisis.

According to Sombart, late capitalism eliminated this crisis tendency.

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Isabel Clara Ruehl at Literary Hub:

I skirted an abandoned development of some kind, half-built, its windows smashed, wild dogs on its concrete foundation barking at me not to come any closer…

This is a sentence from one of the first pieces I ever fact checked. In the passage, the writer walks from the Rome airport to the mouth of the Tiber; I’d just been hired by Harper’s Magazine, and my job was to verify the essay by Monday. It sounded easy enough. I found some derelict buildings on Google Street View—check, check (at Harper’s, we physically tick off each word that’s verified, pen-on-paper, so that our eyes don’t scan over any detail)—but how to confirm that there might be wild dogs in the area…?

I searched the internet with no yield, but I wasn’t bothered. Surely this was plausible. Still, I wanted to be thorough, so I contacted various tourism and wildlife places. “We’re sorry but we cannot answer,” one replied. So on Monday, I told my editor (himself a former checker) that this fact seemed unprovable but fine. How could we know whether the writer had seen wild dogs? I’d learned that they weren’t frequently running about Rome, but so what? To my surprise, he asked whether I’d called the airport, so I did. They were very confused.

Austin Kelley’s debut novel The Fact Checker dramatizes these questions of fact, truth, and provability as the protagonist checks an article about the Union Square Greenmarket. Narrative nonfiction exists in a gray area, somewhere between reporting and poetry, and the checker’s job is to break an essay into its component parts, confirm what’s true, and fix what’s false.

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From Office Chai:

OpenAI had stunned the world by releasing ChatGPT in November 2022, but it turns out that the researchers working on the technology were even more stunned at what they’d developed.

Jeff Clune, a former researcher at OpenAI, says that building AI felt like watching an AI intelligence arrive. His words paint a vivid picture of a small group of scientists who felt they held a world-altering secret, a sentiment that oscillated between exhilarating and terrifying. Clune had worked at OpenAI from January 2020 to May 2022, and now works at Google DeepMind.

Clune’s analogy captures the surreal feeling of knowing the world was on the precipice of a monumental shift, while life for everyone else continued as normal. “It’s kind of like you’re an astronomer,” he explained. “You’re looking at your equipment, your sensors and your computer readouts, and you and a handful of other people have the expertise to look at this complicated data and say, ‘Oh my gosh, aliens are on the way. They’re going to arrive on Earth in a couple of years.’”

More here.

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David Austin Walsh in the Boston Review:

There is clearly a groundswell of anti-MAGA political energy across the country, and yet the most recent Quinnipiac University poll found that 53 percent of Democrats disapprove of how the Democratic Party is doing in Congress. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s approval rating, in particular, is hovering around 17 percent—and given Schumer’s vocal support for Israel’s strikes on Iran, that number is likely only to plummet more.

And then there’s Zohran Mamdani. His decisive victory in the New York mayoral primary on Tuesday against establishment sex pest Andrew Cuomo, the former-governor-son-of-a-former-governor, underlines how Democrats have finally arrived at their Tea Party moment: voters fed up with the feckless, corrupt dealings and nepotism of a hollowed-out Democratic Party registered their dissatisfaction in the highest-profile race of 2025, succeeding despite a torrent of national criticism and propaganda from the establishment.

More here.

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Sebastian Smee in The Washington Post:

This Buddha — its head and shoulders the color of translucent flames, its torso pockmarked by wounds, its robes a rich burgundy — is the manifestation of an idea of art that’s both dazzlingly new and profoundly ancient. If you’ve not seen anything quite like it — well, neither have I. (It’s on show at the Mario Diacono Gallery in Boston until July 5.)

“Buddha,” by Barry X Ball, is familiar only to the extent that it follows a type recognizable from Mahayana Buddhism. It’s modeled after a 15th- or 16th-century seated Buddha from Japan, in lacquer and gilt wood. The Amitābha, as this type is called, expresses “measureless life” (a function of infinite compassion), bliss and a harmonizing force that radiates throughout the cosmos.

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Eliana Dockterman in Time Magazine:

Ryan Reynolds is trying to focus on our conversation. But all he can think about is the script pulled up on his laptop. The screenwriting software Final Draft has frozen so he can’t plug in his latest ideas for a project that he has asked me not to share. He reluctantly abandons his computer but can’t help but fidget. Reynolds knows he’ll only have a few hours later to return to the story before he’s on dad duty. “I’m obsessive,” he says. “Even right now I’m thinking what I have after you, and if I can get back to it again.” His schedule after our interview is packed: a business meeting; someone is coming to fix Final Draft; then a walk-and-talk with Deadpool & Wolverine director Shawn Levy to discuss Levy’s upcoming Star Wars movie starring the other Ryan—Gosling.

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Leann Davis Alspaugh at the Hedgehog Review:

According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, phenomenology is defined as the study of “the structure of various types of experience ranging from perception, thought, memory, imagination, emotion, desire, and volition to bodily awareness, embodied action, and social activity, including linguistic activity. The structure of these forms of experience typically involves what Husserl called ‘intentionality,’ that is, the directedness of experience toward things in the world, the property of consciousness that it is a consciousness of or about something.” That’s quite a load for a kiddie ride but let’s turn Porky loose and see what he can do.

As we have already seen, Porky the kiddie ride has a cultural history: a place in time and a role in people’s lives. He represents a technological innovation that deploys mechanics and electricity for entertainment purposes. He holds a place in popular imagination both as a character and as an amusement.

more here.

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Jia Tolentino at The New Yorker:

The virgin allegations emerged about a decade ago. Young people “are so sexually inactive that it practically boggles the mind,” a writer for Bustle proclaimed, in 2016, invoking a then recent study that suggested that celibacy had lately doubled among people in their early twenties. Two years later, The Atlantic gave this evident trend its working name, with a cover story on “The Sex Recession.” (The illustration: a bird and a bee turned away from each other, looking both sullen and shy.) The youth had stopped fucking. They were a “new generation of prigs, prudes, and squares,” a blog declared; they were “anxious, lonely and addicted to porn,” according to the Telegraph. They were dragging the rest of the population down with them, the Washington Post argued, blaming the “Great American Sex Drought” on young people, and particularly young men, for being losers, more or less—having no girlfriends, living with their parents, preferring video games and social media to real, live, naked bodies.

This, it should be noted, was not your typical kids-these-days hand-wringing. Traditionally, it is the role of the old to worry that the young are having sex too much. In the nineteen-twenties, society’s elders panicked about flappers fornicating in speakeasies; the sixties prompted fears of love cults and orgies; the eighties brought a new wave of AIDS-centered gay panic.

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Just Jazz

Last summer I became a bird
plucked straw from the fields
plundered cotton from old chairs
to make a quiet nest

Fluttered in fountains
twittered when cats were near
dug Miles and Trane for sustenance
and Billie Holiday

No problem
No sweat
just Jazz

by Nikki Giovanni
from Blues For All The Changes
William Morrow and Company, 1999

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