IN A 2019 INTERVIEW with Lauren Elkin, the writer Virginie Despentes remarked of #MeToo that something was missing from the movement, “disconcerting” stories that didn’t fit into an increasingly streamlined regime of victimhood: “I want to see an uprising of loose women,” she said. “It’s really important to give voice to people practicing a sexuality that isn’t quite—correct.” Despentes broke onto the scene with 1993’s notorious Baise-moi (Fuck Me in English, though some markets have translated the title as Rape Me instead), an unhinged fever dream of a novel following two women—one a prostitute, the other the survivor of a gang rape loosely based on Despentes’s own—on a robbery, fucking, and killing spree. The movie, when Despentes adapted it with filmmaker and porn actress Coralie Trinh Thi in 2000, was the first to be banned in France in twenty-eight years. In response to accusations that the film wasn’t art but pornography, Trinh Thi scoffed that it couldn’t possibly be porn—it wasn’t produced “for masturbation.”
The protagonists of the novel, Nadine and Manu, react to their sexual and economic victimization not with shame or paralysis, but with a shocking torrent of morally unassimilable desire and force.
Human populations will start to decrease globally in a few more decades. Thereafter fewer and few humans will be alive to contribute labor and to consume what is made. However at the same historical moment as this decrease, we are creating millions of AIs and robots and agents, who could potentially not only generate new and old things, but also consume them as well, and to continue to grow the economy in a new and different way. This is a Economic Handoff, from those who are born to those who are made.
It has been nearly a thousand years since we last saw the total number of humans on this planet decrease year by year. For nearly a millennium we have lived with growing populations, and faster rates of growth. But in the coming decades, for the first time in a thousand years, the number of deaths on the planet each year will exceed the number of births.
John Marco Allegro thought he had found a secret key. The problem was, no one would believe him.
In 01953, Allegro had been invited to the dusty shores of the Dead Sea to evaluate a newly unearthed trove of long-lost sacred documents — part of a team of respected British archaeologists brought to decipher one the greatest historical discoveries of the 20th century. The scrolls found there in the caves of Qumran had revealed a missing link in the evolution of Jewish spirituality, a rare and never-before-seen glimpse into the ancient world.
Allegro was soon assigned the work of translating a copper scroll that detailed the location of a vast treasure horde. But it was another hidden treasure that occupied his mind. Returning to Britain to study the documents in detail, he began constructing an elaborate theory based on hidden meanings he thought these ancient scrolls contained — a theory that would upend the entirety of sacred history.
In the novel, El Akkad disturbs his readers by projecting America’s present into a terrifying vision of what their familiar homeland might look like many decades hence. Here, he seeks to discomfit us by doing the opposite — asking us to look back on the present from an imagined future: “One day it will be considered unacceptable, in the polite liberal circles of the West, not to acknowledge all the innocent people killed in that long-ago unpleasantness. … One day the social currency of liberalism will accept as legal tender the suffering of those they previously smothered in silence.”
Yet El Akkad himself is struggling against silence — not the taciturnity of indifference or cowardice but the near muteness imposed by the inadequacy of language in the face of mass obliteration. “One Day” reminded me of Samuel Beckett’s statement about having “no power to express … together with the obligation to express.” Whatever one thinks of its arguments, the book has the desperate vitality of a writer trying to wrench from mere words some adequate answer to his own question: “What is left to say but more dead, more dead?”
Work took me to Ireland ……….. a twelve-hour flight. The river Liffy; ……….. ale in a bar, So many stories ……….. of passions and wars— A hilltop stone tomb ……….. with the wind across the door. Peat swamps go by: ……….. people of the ice age. Endless fields and farms— ……….. the last two thousand years.
I read my poems in Galway, ……….. just the chirp of a bug. And flew home thinking ……….. of literature and time.
The rows of books ……….. in the long hall at Trinity The ranks of stony ranges ……….. above the ice of Greenland.
by Gary Snyder from danger on peaks Shoemaker Hoard, 2004
………..
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Five months after Donald Trump moved into the White House in 2017, a reporter asked Vladimir Putin about the allegations that Russia had interfered in U.S. elections. After all, Trump had proclaimed that it would “be nice if we got along with Russia” during his campaign, and members of the Duma had greeted his victory with champagne toasts. But Putin quickly brushed the notion aside. There would be no point. Though American presidents come and go, he said, nothing ever really changes: “Do you know why? Because of the powerful bureaucracy. When a person is elected, they may have some ideas. Then people with briefcases arrive, well dressed, wearing dark suits, just like mine except for the red tie, since they wear black or dark-blue ones. These people start explaining how things are done. And instantly everything changes. This is what happens with every administration.”
“Today is a good day to arrest the cops who killed Breonna Taylor.” This phrase started as a call for the Kentucky Attorney General’s Office to hold accountable the officers that shot and killed the 26-year-old Louisville resident in her home in March 2020. In the months after Taylor’s killing, social media influencers and celebrities adopted the phrase to draw attention to her death as a way to disrupt the picturesque and cavalier digital culture of platforms like Instagram and Tik Tok. Oprah Winfrey even gave up her coveted spot on the cover of O Magazine by putting a picture of Taylor, an emergency medical technician, on the cover. Winfrey also placed billboards around the city of Louisville (one of which were vandalized) to demand the arrest of the officers involved.
For a moment, this attention seemed to bring attention to Breonna and by extension Black women who are victims of police brutality.
More here. (Note: In honor of Black History Month, at least one post will be devoted to its 2025 theme of “African Americans and Labor” throughout the month of February)
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Julie Stone Peters in the Los Angeles Review of Books:
Feisty contrarian Stanley Fish has served us for decades as the public intellectual people love to hate. Feminist social critic Camille Paglia famously described him as “a totalitarian Tinkerbell.” Marxist literary theorist Terry Eagleton said he was “the Donald Trump of American academia, a brash, noisy entrepreneur of the intellect who pushes his ideas in the conceptual marketplace with all the fervour with which others peddle second-hand Hoovers.” A brilliant scholar of late medieval and Renaissance poetry, he came to prominence in the 1980s for his claim that “interpretive communities” determine how you interpret a text—a theory that offered liberal legal scholars an alternative to the rigid originalism and textualism of the conservative Rehnquist Supreme Court. Teaching at prestigious law schools (while secretly working toward a night school law degree), he began writing for public venues. TheNew York Times eventually gave him a syndicated column, where he opined on everything from the decline of the humanities to Hillary-hating and stepping on Jesus (on a scrap of paper). Both on lecture tours and in print, he has fought with all comers: conservative justice Antonin Scalia, liberal rights theorists Ronald Dworkin and Martha Nussbaum, radical law professor Duncan Kennedy.
At age 86, Fish is still at it. A heretic of the left, he still loves pillorying liberal pieties.
Conflict theory is the belief that political disagreements come from material conflict. So for example, if rich people support capitalism, and poor people support socialism, this isn’t because one side doesn’t understand economics. It’s because rich people correctly believe capitalism is good for the rich, and poor people correctly believe socialism is good for the poor. Or if white people are racist, it’s not because they have some kind of mistaken stereotypes that need to be corrected – it’s because they correctly believe racism is good for white people.
Some people comment on my more political posts claiming that they’re useless. You can’t (they say) produce change by teaching people Economics 101 or the equivalent. Conflict theorists understand that nobody ever disagreed about Economics 101. Instead you should try to organize and galvanize your side, so they can win the conflict.
I think simple versions of conflict theory are clearly wrong. This doesn’t mean that simple versions of mistake theory (the idea that people disagree because of reasoning errors, like not understanding Economics 101) are automatically right. But it gives some leeway for thinking harder about how reasoning errors and other kinds of error interact.
I don’t want to live with your ghost It’s you you I love the light in your eyes in mine your lips naming me kissing me the taste of your skin the scent of your body your fingers entwined in my hair your footsteps showing me the way. I don’t want to imagine you in a cloud or wait for you in my dreams or chew on faded memories. It’s you you I love your eyes your lips your hands. Your absence is a crow gnawing my entrails and I am tied to time and cannot escape.
by Claribel Alegría from Sorrow Curbstone Press translation- Carolyn Forché __________ The Spanish:
Prometeo
No quiero vivir con tu fantasma a ti a ti te quiero a la luz de tus ojos en los mios a tus labios nombrándome besándome al sabor de tu piel al odor de tu cuerpo a tus dedos enredándose en mi pelo a tus pasos señalándome el camino. No quiero adivinarte en una nube ni acecharte en el sueño ni masticar memorias ya marchitas. A ti a ti te quiero a tus ojos a tus labios a tus manos es en cuervo tu ausencia que me roe y estoy atada al tiempo y no puedo escapar.
by Claribel Alegría
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If the number of on-camera screams is any indication, Kim Kardashian’s first encounter with epigenetics was a thrilling one. The reality-television star and her family shrieked and squealed in the season finale of The Kardashians in Los Angeles, California, last July as they each learnt the results of a commercial blood test that purportedly assessed their “biological ages”. Although Kardashian was 43, the placement of chemical markers on her DNA — her ‘epigenetic profile’ — matched that of a 34-year-old, according to the test. Her body, moreover, was ageing 18% more slowly than most people of her age. “You should give yourself a pat on the back,” said Matthew Dawson as he relayed the results. (Dawson is chief executive of TruDiagnostic in Lexington, Kentucky, the company that sells the test.)
On the other side of the country, neuropsychologist Terrie Moffitt says she was “mortified” when she saw the segment. Moffitt, who works at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, had spent decades with her colleagues collecting data from around 1,000 people to create the basis for one of the tests provided by TruDiagnostic. She had hoped that her work might one day inform medical decisions or provide a way for researchers to assess whether an anti-ageing treatment is having a positive effect on health. A stunt on a reality-TV show was not the kind of publicity she was aiming for. “I have a snob’s view of reality TV,” she adds.
Before 2014, the call to “stay woke” was, for many people, unheard of. The idea behind it was common within Black communities at that point — the notion that staying “woke” and alert to the deceptions of other people was a basic survival tactic. But in 2014, following the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, “stay woke” suddenly became the cautionary watchword of Black Lives Matter activists on the streets, used in a chilling and specific context: keeping watch for police brutality and unjust police tactics.
In the six years since Brown’s death, “woke” has evolved into a single-word summation of leftist political ideology, centered on social justice politics and critical race theory. This framing of “woke” is bipartisan: It’s used as a shorthand for political progressiveness by the left, and as a denigration of leftist culture by the right.
More here. (Note: In honor of Black History Month, at least one post will be devoted to its 2025 theme of “African Americans and Labor” throughout the month of February)
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I left private equity to work on shrimp welfare. When I tell anyone this, they usually think I’ve lost my mind. I know the feeling — I’ve been there. When I first read Charity Entrepreneurship’s proposal for a shrimp welfare charity, I thought: “Effective altruists have gone mad — who cares about shrimp?”
The transition from analyzing real estate deals to advocating for some of the smallest animals in our food system feels counterintuitive, to say the least. But it was the same muscle I used converting derelict office buildings into luxury hotels that allowed me to appreciate an enormous opportunity overlooked by almost everyone, including those in the animal welfare space. I still spend my days analyzing returns (though they’re now measured in suffering averted). I still work to identify mutual opportunities with industry partners. Perhaps most importantly, I still view it as paramount to build trust with people who — initially — sit on opposite sides of the table.
After years of practicing my response to the inevitable raised eyebrows, I now sum it up simply: ignoring shrimp welfare would have been both negligent and reckless.
I have been experimenting with the first of a new generation AI models, Claude 3.7 and Grok 3, for the last few days. Grok 3 is the first model that we know trained with an order of magnitude more computing power of GPT-4, and Claude includes new coding and reasoning capabilities, so they are not just interesting in their own right but also tell us something important about where AI is going.
Before we get there, a quick review: this new generation of AIs is smarter and the jump in capabilities is striking, particularly in how these models handle complex tasks, math and code. These models often give me the same feeling I had when using ChatGPT-4 for the first time, where I am equally impressed and a little unnerved by what it can do. Take Claude’s native coding ability, I can now get working programs through natural conversation or documents, no programming skill needed.
Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way in Foreign Affairs:
Donald Trump’s first election to the presidency in 2016 triggered an energetic defense of democracy from the American establishment. But his return to office has been met with striking indifference. Many of the politicians, pundits, media figures, and business leaders who viewed Trump as a threat to democracy eight years ago now treat those concerns as overblown—after all, democracy survived his first stint in office. In 2025, worrying about the fate of American democracy has become almost passé.
The timing of this mood shift could not be worse, for democracy is in greater peril today than at any time in modern U.S. history. America has been backsliding for a decade: between 2014 and 2021, Freedom House’s annual global freedom index, which scores all countries on a scale of zero to 100, downgraded the United States from 92 (tied with France) to 83 (below Argentina and tied with Panama and Romania), where it remains.
The country’s vaunted constitutional checks are failing.
IN A 2019 INTERVIEW with Lauren Elkin, the writer Virginie Despentes remarked of #MeToo that something was missing from the movement, “disconcerting” stories that didn’t fit into an increasingly streamlined regime of victimhood: “I want to see an uprising of loose women,” she said. “It’s really important to give voice to people practicing a sexuality that isn’t quite—correct.” Despentes broke onto the scene with 1993’s notorious Baise-moi (Fuck Me in English, though some markets have translated the title as Rape Me instead), an unhinged fever dream of a novel following two women—one a prostitute, the other the survivor of a gang rape loosely based on Despentes’s own—on a robbery, fucking, and killing spree. The movie, when Despentes adapted it with filmmaker and porn actress Coralie Trinh Thi in 2000, was the first to be banned in France in twenty-eight years. In response to accusations that the film wasn’t art but pornography, Trinh Thi scoffed that it couldn’t possibly be porn—it wasn’t produced “for masturbation.”
Human populations will start to decrease globally in a few more decades. Thereafter fewer and few humans will be alive to contribute labor and to consume what is made. However at the same historical moment as this decrease, we are creating millions of AIs and robots and agents, who could potentially not only generate new and old things, but also consume them as well, and to continue to grow the economy in a new and different way. This is a Economic Handoff, from those who are born to those who are made.
In the novel, El Akkad disturbs his readers by projecting America’s present into a terrifying vision of what their familiar homeland might look like many decades hence. Here, he seeks to discomfit us by doing the opposite — asking us to look back on the present from an imagined future: “One day it will be considered unacceptable, in the polite liberal circles of the West, not to acknowledge all the innocent people killed in that long-ago unpleasantness. … One day the social currency of liberalism will accept as legal tender the suffering of those they previously smothered in silence.”
F
“Today is a good day to arrest the cops who killed Breonna Taylor.” This phrase started as a call for the Kentucky Attorney General’s Office to hold accountable the officers that shot and killed the 26-year-old Louisville resident in her home in March 2020. In the months after Taylor’s killing, social media 
Feisty contrarian Stanley Fish has served us for decades as the public intellectual people love to hate. Feminist social critic Camille Paglia famously 
Conflict theory is the belief that political disagreements come from material conflict. So for example, if rich people support capitalism, and poor people support socialism, this isn’t because one side doesn’t understand economics. It’s because rich people correctly believe capitalism is good for the rich, and poor people correctly believe socialism is good for the poor. Or if white people are racist, it’s not because they have some kind of mistaken stereotypes that need to be corrected – it’s because they correctly believe racism is good for white people.
If the number of on-camera screams is any indication, Kim Kardashian’s first encounter with 
Before 2014, the call to “stay woke” was, for many people, unheard of. The idea behind it was common within Black communities at that point — the notion that staying “woke” and alert to the deceptions of other people was a basic survival tactic. But in 2014, following 
I left private equity to work on shrimp welfare. When I tell anyone this, they usually think I’ve lost my mind. I know the feeling — I’ve been there. When I first read Charity Entrepreneurship’s proposal for a shrimp welfare charity, I thought: “Effective altruists have gone mad — who cares about shrimp?”
I have been experimenting with the first of a new generation AI models, Claude 3.7 and Grok 3, for the last few days. Grok 3 is the first model that we know trained with an order of magnitude more computing power of GPT-4, and Claude includes new coding and reasoning capabilities, so they are not just interesting in their own right but also tell us something important about where AI is going.
Donald Trump’s first election to the presidency in 2016 triggered an energetic defense of democracy from the American establishment. But his return to office has been met with striking indifference. Many of the politicians, pundits, media figures, and business leaders who viewed Trump as a threat to democracy eight years ago now treat those concerns as overblown—after all, democracy survived his first stint in office. In 2025, worrying about the fate of American democracy has become almost passé.