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Dharma Queries

—A Quick Review of the Present Yuga

1. Nature and Man—the great Paleolithic Goddess and the
antler’d dancer—magic paintings in caves; red hands; red
dots.
2. Social energy and Man—the gathering of bronze and
iron-age power; tribes become “nations” and expand—the pole
Star, the War Chief, the penis-as-weapon resolve as
God in Heaven.
3. A reaction to pure social and warrior-power mystiques:
teachers of social management—Confucius, Zoroaster, Judaic
reforms; spiritual-social disciplines like the Gita.
4. Christianity, Buddhism, Confucianism, temper the power
hunger of states and castles; with emphasis on individual
responsibility and liberation.
5. These systems become power-manipulators in turn, while
within them survival of archaic Nature-and-Man traditions
regain influence. Yogacara Buddhism leading toward Vajrayana;
Mediterranean mystery cults leading towards dozens of
occidental occult and alchemical streams of thought.
6. Contemporary Science: the knowledge that society and any
given cultural outlook is arbitrary; and that the more we
conquer Nature the weaker we get. The objective eye of science,
stiving to see Nature plain, must finally look at “subject”
and “object” and the very eye that looks. We discover that all
of us carry within us caves; with animals and gods on the
walls; a place of ritual and Magic.

Gary Snyder
from Earth House Hold
new Directions Books, 1969

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Ella Creamer in The Guardian:

The next manuscript by Indian writer Amitav Ghosh will not be read for 89 years, as he becomes the 12th author to contribute to the Future Library project.

Ghosh joins Margaret Atwood, Han Kang, Ocean Vuong and other prominent authors who have written secret manuscripts, which are locked away until 2114.

The texts are stored in a specifically designed silent room in the Deichman Bjørvika building at the public library in Oslo. At the end of the project, the full anthology of texts will be printed using paper made from trees from the Future Library forest in Nordmarka, in northern Oslo, where 1,000 spruce trees were planted by Katie Paterson, the artist behind the project, in 2014.

Ghosh, whose novels include The Circle of Reason and Sea of Poppies, said being invited to participate in the Future Library project was a “profound honour and a humbling act of trust”. The initiative “compels us to think beyond our lifetimes, to imagine readers who have not yet been born”.

More here.

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Sean B. Carroll at Big Think:

When you think about the long history of life on Earth, you might think, “well, it’s been this progression.” Almost as though it had a direction, almost had a purpose, and that some things are predictable. Not at all. When you really unpack the geological history of the planet and the biological history of the planet, it’s been a random walk through all sorts of events.

The Earth is evolving, the physical entity of the Earth is evolving, and life has to evolve right along with it. So we need to have this understanding of this relationship, this coupling between the physical planet that life exists on and what’s going on with life itself. Intersect those two, and it’s an incredible series of accidents that’s given us the world we know today.

This is really a deep philosophical rub for humanity. For millennia, philosophers and theologians have asked the question: Does everything happen for a reason, or do some things happen by chance? And I would really say it’s only about the last 60 years or so that scientists would be saying, “oh, my goodness, it’s a remarkable series of events that were required for us to be here.” And that so many things could have happened in a different way that we wouldn’t be here at all, both individually, for sure, and certainly as a species.

More here.

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Kristina Lerman and David Chu at After Babel:

Researchers have only just begun to systematically explore the psychological dynamics of human-AI relationships. Recent studies suggest that AI chatbots have high emotional competence. For example, responses from social chatbots have been rated as more compassionate than those of licensed physicians [Ayers et al, 2023.] and expert crisis counselors [Ovsyannikova et al., 2025], although knowing the response came from the chatbot rather than a human can reduce perceived empathy [Rubin et al., 2025]. Still, chatbots provide genuine emotional support. One study found that lonely college students credited their chatbot companions with preventing suicidal thoughts [Maples et al., 2024]. However, most of these studies have focused on (young) adults. We still know very little about how children and adolescents respond to emotionally intelligent AI — or how such interactions may shape their development, relationships, or self-concept over time.

To better understand this phenomenon, we turned to Reddit, a popular online platform where people gather in forums to talk about everything from hobbies and relationships to mental health. In recent years, forums dedicated to AI companions have grown rapidly.

More here.

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Elena Saavedra Buckley at the New Yorker:

One night this past spring, the audience members at a bagpipe concert in Red Hook, Brooklyn, could be organized into two neat categories: people who knew little to nothing about bagpipes—the majority—and people who knew so much that the backs of their jackets were festooned with regimental patches for the uniformed pipe bands of various Northeastern cities. The latter group had mostly come to the event together in a van from Connecticut, where they lived. One of the jacket-wearers, a man with a septum piercing named Benjamin, spends his free time 3-D-printing custom bagpipe drones—the cylindrical pipes that sound the instrument’s continuous, harmonically dense vibrations. When I asked him why he did this, he seemed stunned by the question. “Um, more drone?” he said.

Everyone had come to see the twenty-seven-year-old Brìghde (pronounced “Breech-huh”) Chaimbeul, considered one of the most skillful and interesting bagpipe players in the world, who was visiting from her native Scotland. Chaimbeul walked onstage in a witchy outfit, grounded by a navy tartan skirt, her raven hair up in a half bun and her dark-browed face set calmly. Shahzad Ismaily, a celebrated experimental-jazz musician, sat next to her with a chunky Moog synthesizer on his lap.

more here.

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Richard J Evans at the New Statesman:

Just over 100 years ago, on 18 July 1925, the most notorious book of the 20th century was published – Mein Kampf (“My Struggle”) by Adolf Hitler, who became dictator of Germany less than eight years later. It has been described as the epitome of “absolute evil”, the “most disgusting of all books” and “the nadir of depravity”. More than a few historians have regarded the book as providing a blueprint for what came later, from the destruction of German democracy and the genocide of Europe’s Jews to the launching of the Second World War and the ruthless ethnic cleansing of Eastern Europe by the Nazis. Its centenary provides an opportunity for re-examining its origins, its nature and its influence.

Hitler began writing the book during a period of enforced idleness following his arrest and imprisonment for leading a violent attempt to overthrow the state government of Bavaria on 9 November 1923 – the so-called Beer Hall Putsch – which ended in a hail of bullets fired at him and his Nazi supporters by the Bavarian police. Brought to trial in Munich on 26 February 1924, Hitler claimed that he had acted purely out of patriotic motives.

more here.

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James Surowiecki in The Yale Review:

This is a pivotal moment for American capitalism. Even though GDP and household incomes have grown steadily in this century, most Americans say they feel dissatisfied with the state of the economy and believe that the country’s economic future will be worse than its past. There is a deep sense of discontent with capitalism, and a conviction that the two paradigms of political economy that have dominated the West since World War II—Keynesian social democracy on the one hand and free-market-centered neoliberalism on the other—no longer work. And while politicians like Bernie Sanders, with his left-wing populism, and Donald Trump, with his right-wing nationalism, have tapped into this discontent, what the new order will ultimately look like remains wholly unclear.

This is, then, a perfect moment for John Cassidy’s new book, Capitalism and Its Critics, which takes, as its title suggests, a wide-ranging look at the history of capitalism through the eyes of some of its foremost critics. Cassidy includes not just the obvious ones—Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Thorstein Veblen, and Thomas Piketty, for instance—but also lesser-known yet extraordinarily interesting writers, such as the Irish proto-socialist William Thompson, the French Peruvian feminist socialist Flora Tristan, and the Indian economist J. C. Kumarappa.

More here.

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Poem

and greenhouse and topsoil and basil greens
and cowshit and snowfall and spinach knife
and woodsmoke and watering can and common thistle

and potato digger and peach trees
and poison parsnip and romaine hearts
and rockpiles and spring trilliums and ramp circles

what song of grassblade
what creak of dark rustle tree
and blueblack wind from the north

this vetch this grapevine
this waterhose this mosspatch

sunflower gardens in the lowland
dog graves between the apple trees

this fistfull of onion tops
this garlic laid silent in the barn
this green this green this green

sweet cucumber leaf
sweet yellow bean

and all this I try to make a human shape
the darkness regenerating a shadow of a limb

my tongue embraces the snap pea
and so it is sweet

how does the rusted golfcart in the chickweed
inform my daily breath

I’m sorry I want to say
to the unhearing spaces
between the dogwood trees

for my tiny little life
I have pressed into
your bruising green skin

by Lucy Walker
from Pank Magazine

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Noah Smith at Noahpinion:

Americans who go to Tokyo or Paris or Seoul or London are often wowed by the efficient train systems, dense housing, and walkable city streets lined with shops and restaurants. And yet in these countries, many secondary cities also have these attractive features. Go to Nagoya or Fukuoka, and the trains will be almost as convenient, the houses almost as dense, and the streets almost as attractive as in Tokyo.

The U.S. is very different. We have New York City, and that’s about it. People from Chicago or Boston may protest that their own cities are also walkable, but transit use statistics show just how big the gap is between NYC and everybody else…

More here.

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Cal Flyn interviews Sandra Knapp at Five Books:

You chaired the judging panel for the 2025 Royal Society Book Prize. What were you and your fellow judges looking for when you selected the best new popular science books?

There are so many good science books that it was really, really difficult. We were looking for books with interesting, solid, well-researched science, but which were also incredibly readable. You want a book that a reader will come away from having learned something new about science, but also that they had a good time reading that book. So it’s about learning and pleasure being mixed into one, and the product being something that you perhaps want to read again.

It does seem that there are different flavours of intelligence. One being what it takes to make a brilliant scientist, and another being able to communicate clearly those complex ideas.

Yes. Not all of the books on our shortlist are actually written by scientists; some are by science writers or journalists. But whichever side of that spectrum you sit on, you need to be able to put yourself in another person’s shoes to be able to tell a story in a compelling way.

More here.

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Michela Massimi in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

The hard statistics underlying poverty and social mobility opportunities for children and other marginalized individuals might seem like an unlikely entry point for a philosophy book. Yet they are the impetus for philosopher of science Philip Kitcher’s latest project: The Rich and the Poor (2025). The book’s cover sets the tone. Featuring side-by-side portraits of rich individuals enjoying cocktails by an infinity pool and a woman with children kicking home canisters filled with water collected at a nearby water aid station, it is meant to be—and is—uncanny.

Kitcher is not new to book projects that engage with ethical problems and wider policy questions. From Science, Truth, and Democracy (2001) to The Ethical Project (2011), from The Seasons Alter: How to Save Our Planet in Six Acts (co-authored with Evelyn Fox Keller, 2017) to Moral Progress (2021), he has pioneered a method of philosophy and thinking about science that is both sensitive to socioeconomic realities and responsive to ethical challenges. The Rich and the Poor continues this intellectual trajectory while also bringing in autobiographical details: Kitcher himself benefited from an improbable combination of “progressive politicians, a sensitive boy king, and an unusually thoughtful and kind schoolmaster.”

More here.

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Peter Dale Scott at Church Life Journal:

This poem reads like a precursor to the decision to act (like Einstein) in the second “fragment” of “To Albert Einstein.” The poet, as if in a New Year’s resolution, has now decided that it is better to speak out dangerously than to be silent. But he has not yet settled on what he will say (i.e., make a clean break with the post-war Polish state for which he was still working).

It could even be that by writing the first “fragment” Milosz contemplated his enforced muteness, and recognized that he must correct it. His silence was a feature above all of his status as a diplomat. But this was precisely when his U.S. post was ending; and he was obsessed with the decision whether or not to defect and start a new life. But to defect would prolong indefinitely his separation from his Polish-speaking audience behind the Iron Curtain, a second and deeper reason why any cries from him could not be heard.

more here.

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Juan Carlos González at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews:

Carlos Sánchez has dedicated a lot of thought and ink to two questions: (1) Is there such a thing as “Mexican philosophy”? and (2) If there is such a thing, does it matter? Throughout his career, Sánchez has consistently answered the first question affirmatively. In response to the second, Sánchez has shared that this tradition matters to him for personal reasons. Mexican philosophy has enriched his life, providing resources not only for deep philosophical speculation but also for coming to grips with his identity as a Mexican American. Yet, with respect to the question of why this tradition should matter to everyone regardless of their background, he at one point confessed, “There is, of course, a well-developed and highly nuanced answer to the question as to why one should study Mexican philosophy ‘at all’. But I haven’t found it yet” (2019).

Mexican Philosophy for the 21st Century delivers a well-developed, highly nuanced, and compelling answer to the question of why one should study Mexican philosophy “at all.” Sánchez’s central task is to “normalize” Mexican philosophy outside Mexico, or to demonstrate to the broader world of academic philosophy (especially in the United States) that Mexican philosophy has an original, rich, and overlooked set of tools for addressing human crises.

more here.

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Tao of Duck

I sit on a high rock over a lake watching
a duck swim. Sun warm, rock cold, not yet summer.
Friends about, but not near, lake maybe half
a mile wide, duck a third of the way across,
making steady progress. I wait for it to grow
bored with paddling, to unfurl its wings, kick
its feet free, and erupt into air. My mind’s eye
sees beneath the surface one wide webby foot
pushing back while the other, momentarily
narrow, pulls forward – again and again, legs
alternating, chug chugging like a two stroke engine.
I grow annoyed, If you want to get to the other
side, fly, my reasonable self thinks at the bird,
but it sails on, little feathered boat on a large sea,
a stubborn captain in the bridge above the bill,
eye on the far shore, calling into the speaker tube,
Full Foot Ahead. He will not push the fly button.
Strange and aggravating, this duck’s way,
as aggravating as a saint’s.

by Nils Peterson

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