Matthew Wills at JSTOR Daily:

How far back must we go to understand the roots of the long enmity between Iran and the United States? A good place to start is the Iran Hostage Crisis, sparked forty-six years ago after the US ally, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, sought protection and medical care in the US. Iranian revolutionaries took over the US Embassy in Tehran in November 1979 and held sixty-six staffers, demanding the Shah’s return.

The Shah, head of the monarchy, died in Egypt in July 1980, at the age of sixty. Fifty-two of the Embassy hostages were held for 444 days, until January 1981. Relations have generally been abysmal since, reaching another nadir with the US’s recent bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Others go back further still, to the coup that toppled the last democratically elected Iranian government. That was in 1953. Famously, or infamously, the CIA has been given much of the credit for ending the government of Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq. A 2019 NPR piece, for instance, largely reduces complex events to the actions of a single individual, Kermit Roosevelt Jr, the CIA’s man in Tehran (and Teddy Roosevelt’s grandson).

more here.

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Margaret Talbot at The New Yorker:

This past August, in a windowless room of the British Library, in London, Tasha Marks was enacting her own form of time travel. Marks is a scent designer who works with museums, heritage sites, and other cultural spaces to create odors that can open an instant portal to the past. The library had commissioned her to concoct historical smells for an exhibition about the lives of medieval women. On a conference table, Marks placed an array of bottles and fanned out several mouillettes—the paper strips that perfumers use to sample fragrances.

The library would be putting on display a thirteenth-century edition of a remarkable Latin manuscript called “De Ornatu Mulierum,” a compendium of beauty and hygiene advice for women. Marks had obtained ingredients listed in the manuscript to re-create the smell of a breath freshener and of a hair perfume that would have been applied as a powder, like dry shampoo. (“Let her make furrows in her hair and sprinkle on the aforementioned powder, and it will smell marvellously.”) The text didn’t offer exact recipes—no proportions were provided—so there was an element of improvisation, allowing Marks to act as both historian and artist.

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Mark O’Connell in The Guardian:

Jimmy Donaldson, the 27-year-old online content creator and entrepreneur known as MrBeast, is by any reasonable metric one of the most popular entertainers on the planet. His YouTube channel, to which he posts his increasingly elaborate and expensively produced videos, has 400 million subscribers – more than the population of the United States of America and equivalent to the total number of native English speakers currently alive. It’s close to twice as many subscribers as Elon Musk has X followers, and over 100 million more than Taylor Swift has Instagram followers. And that number, 400 million, does not account for the people who watch MrBeast’s videos in passing, or who are aware of his cultural presence because of their children, or who just sort of know who he is but don’t have any intricate awareness as to why he is famous.

That number is the number of people who have made the volitional move of clicking that subscribe button, to ensure that they will a) not miss his latest videos and b) can be literally counted by potential advertisers as a more-or-less guaranteed audience. One last fact, before we move away from numbers and into more nebulous modes of consideration: his 2024 Amazon Prime reality competition show, Beast Games, in which 1,000 contestants competed for $5m (£3.7m), the largest cash prize in television history, reportedly cost $100m to produce, making it the most expensive unscripted show in history. Jimmy Donaldson, at the risk of belabouring the obvious, is an incredibly big deal.

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Ethan Mollick at One Useful Thing:

I increasingly find people asking me “does AI damage your brain?” It’s a revealing question. Not because AI causes literal brain damage (it doesn’t) but because the question itself shows how deeply we fear what AI might do to our ability to think. So, in this post, I want to discuss ways of using AI to help, rather than hurt, your mind. But why the obsession over AI damaging our brains?

Part of this is due to misinterpretation of a much-publicized paper out of the MIT Media Lab (with authors from other institutions as well), titled “Your Brain on ChatGPT.” The actual study is much less dramatic than the press coverage. It involved a small group of college students who were assigned to write essays alone, with Google, or with ChatGPT (and no other tools). The students who used ChatGPT were less engaged and remembered less about their essays than the group without AI.

More here.

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Elisa New in the New York Times:

In 1865, the poet Walt Whitman asked:

O what shall I hang on the chamber walls?

And what shall the pictures be that I hang on the walls,

To adorn the burial-house of him I love?

I have always loved these three lines from Whitman’s elegy “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” which he wrote in the spring of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination. I have been thinking about them as we mark the 249th year since the ratification of the Declaration of Independence. The lines distill an essential question that any artist and civic figure who believes American ideals are worth sustaining must ask: How shall we honor, remember and learn from our national past? And how shall we transmit essential values of the past to citizens of the future?

I’ve had Whitman in mind this spring as we’ve watched the Trump administration and its Department of Government Efficiency disassemble the cultural infrastructure of the nation.

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Andrew Kay in Harper’s Magazine:

“I want y’all to walk to the sign that represents the kind of OCD you most identify with,” announces the moderator, a young woman named Angie Bello who sits cross-legged on the carpet and whose service doodle, Sully, has docked his submarine snout in her lap. Around the room, volunteers hoist placards that say things like violent harm ocd, sexuality ocd, and contamination ocd. They smile benignly, and for an instant all one hundred of us—people ranging from twenty to seventy, joined by nothing but a particular kind of madness—stand frozen, a forest of amygdalas flaring. Outside, San Francisco at dusk: Bob Ross clouds in haphazard sweepings of pink and feathered gray and, darkening beneath them, the city itself, garishly beautiful and troubled.

More here.

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Lynne Peeples in Nature:

George Slavich recalls the final hours he spent with his father. It was a laughter-packed day. His father even broke into the song ‘You Are My Sunshine’ over dinner. “His deep, booming, joyful voice filled the entire restaurant,” says Slavich. “I was semi-mortified, as always, while my daughter relished the serenade.”

Then, about 45 minutes after saying goodbye outside the restaurant, Slavich got a call: his father had died. “I fell to the ground in a puddle of shock and disbelief,” he says. Slavich recognized the mental and emotional trauma he was feeling — and could imagine how it would affect his health. He studies stress for a living, after all. Yet even after he brought up his concerns, his health-care provider didn’t evaluate his stress. “If stress isn’t assessed, then it isn’t addressed,” says Slavich, a clinical psychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “The experience highlighted a paradox between what I know stress is doing to the brain and body, and how little attention it gets in clinical care.”

Decades of research have shown that, although short bursts of stress can be healthy, unrelenting stress contributes to heart disease, cancer, stroke, respiratory disorders, suicide¹ and other leading causes of death. In some cases, prolonged stress drives the onset of a health problem. In others, it accelerates a disease — or induces unhealthy coping behaviours that contribute to chronic conditions².

More here.

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Gaza the Immortal City

I walk through the city of the immortals,

Gary Shteyngart and Jane Ciabattari at Lit Hub:

Vera, the buzzy, brilliant and preternaturally observant ten-year-old central to Gary Shteyngart’s sardonic and profoundly relevant new novel, brings a fresh, necessary perspective to our evolving dystopian universe. Her anxieties as the Russian Jewish-Korean daughter of immigrants surviving in a fraught domestic atmosphere made me pull Shteyngart’s panic-loaded 2014 memoir Little Failure from my bookcase. Yes, there are echoes of the “tightly wound” young Gary, who begins his first unpublished novel in English at ten, in Vera, or Faith. But Vera, in her heart, knows she’s not a failure. And the life of immigrants in 2025 is infinitely more complicated than a decade ago.

Ironically, Vera’s existence may result from a sushi lunch that went sideways. Indeed, Shteyngart wrote Vera, or Faith, in a whirlwind. His editor, David Ebershoff, mentioned that he delivered the novel 51 days after a sushi lunch at which Ebershoff suggested the multigenerational saga Shteyngart had been working on wasn’t working.

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Jerry Saltz at New York Magazine:

Does anyone write love letters anymore? We send emails. Or worse, texts, emoji. Fast, short, disposable. Once, love letters were slow to make and slower to arrive. They were keepsakes, confessions, feelings made physical. They had form. They were a genre unto themselves: often florid, achingly raw, very private. I’ve written them. Maybe you have, too. Now they’ve all but vanished — and with them, a particular architecture of emotion.

The Frick’s luminous new show, “Vermeer’s Love Letters,” captures the essence of that lost world. Curator Aimee Ng says it’s “a very Frick show,” by which she means there are no gimmicks or didactics, just the art. Three paintings, one room, no men. Each painting features two women — a lady and her servant — as well as a letter either being written or accepted. Only one painting, The Love Letter (on loan from the Rijksmuseum in the Netherlands), is explicitly identified as a billet-doux, but all three are suggestive of interior dramas; secret vulnerabilities and joys; two selves reaching toward one another.

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Marlene Laruelle in the Politics and Rights Review:

Scholarship on populism has dominated the last two decades but is now retreating in the face of a new concept that seems better equipped to capture the current transformations in our society: that of illiberalism. Illiberalism emerged first in the transition studies field (one may recall Fareed Zakaria’s famous “Illiberal Democracy” article in Foreign Affairs from 1997), as well as in the Asian Studies field, with studies on the rise of East Asian values embodied by Singapore.

It then grew to encompass the Central European democratic backlash, encapsulated by Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, before eventually reaching the study of the well-established Western democracies and their liberal erosion in the 2010s. The move from an adjective, “illiberal,” to a noun, “illiberalism,” reflects both the intellectual thickening of the protest mood against the current social order and, simultaneously, a better conceptualization of it in the scholarship.

The concept of illiberalism indeed provides a far better descriptor than does populism, as the former asserts that we have moved well beyond the stage of a mere protest mood: parts of our constituencies are now ready to experiment with different social orders.

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Leon Vlieger at The Inquisitive Biologist:

Nature writer Robert Macfarlane will need little introduction, having authored a string of successful books on people, landscape, and language. I was impressed by his 2019 book Underland, so when Is a River Alive? was announced, I decided to spoil myself and purchase the signed Indie Exclusive edition. Billed as his most political book to date, Is a River Alive? is a hydrological odyssey into three river systems that sees Macfarlane wrestle with the titular question and examine its relevance to the nascent Rights of Nature movement.

At the heart of this book are three long, 70–100-page parts that detail visits to three river systems in Ecuador, India, and Canada. They are separated by short palate cleansers, describing brief visits to local springs close to his home in Cambridge. In the back, you will find a surprisingly thorough 10-page glossary, notes, a select bibliography, a combined acknowledgements and aftermaths section detailing developments up to publication, and an index.

This dry enumeration aside, it is the quality of the writing that we are all here for, and Macfarlane is on fine form as he immerses you in the landscapes he visits.

More here.

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Desmond Lachman at Project Syndicate:

When he was France’s finance minister in the 1960s, former French President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing famously complained about the “exorbitant privilege” that the dollar’s position as the world’s leading reserve currency conferred on the United States. This meant, essentially, that the US could borrow at low interest rates, run persistently large trade deficits, and print money to finance its budget deficits. He never could have imagined that the US would end up letting these advantages slip through its fingers.

Since returning to the White House in January, US President Donald Trump has been systematically destroying faith in the dollar in both global financial markets and among governments and central banks. For starters, Trump has put America’s public finances on an even more unsustainable path than they were on before he took office.

When Trump began his second term, the US budget deficit had already widened to 6.2% of GDP, with nearly full employment, while the public-debt-to-GDP ratio had risen to around 100%. But things are about to get much worse.

More here.

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How Things Happen

Rain comes when it will.  It doesn’t care for us.
It’s hitchhiking its way to the sea on a cloud.
The sun is interested in its own fires.  If light
comes, so be it.  Bees feel an itch on their legs
only nectar can sooth.  So many gifts from indifferent
givers.  We walk through the world and smile,
remembering an old love, and Ramona, passing by,
thinks That man thinks I’m pretty, and walks in a way
that makes her more beautiful – and Henry,
walking down the street notices, makes a pass,
and they end up having a good marriage.

by Nils Peterson

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Rebecca Roberts in The Scientist:

Moss is an often-overlooked, ancient plant that is far from insignificant. Among the first to colonize land, mosses greened the planet and transformed Earth’s climate, providing an oxygen-rich atmosphere that allowed animals to evolve.¹ These hardy pioneers can even filter and clean the polluted air of cities.^2,3

Where others see a natural air purifier, Ralf Reski, a plant biotechnologist at the University of Freiburg, saw untapped potential in moss. In addition to the range of valuable compounds they produce naturally, Reski believed it made an ideal culture system to grow recombinant human proteins at scale. Reski first worked on moss as an undergraduate, studying their genetics. He immediately fell in love with the tiny plants, so much so that he asked his supervisor if he could continue working on them for a PhD project. From those early days, his peers quickly dismissed the notion, pointing out that mosses didn’t have to do anything with biotechnology. “You will never become a professor in Germany unless you work with real plants. Nobody is interested in mosses,” Reski recalled the caution from senior professors.

But he persisted.

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