Michael Inzlicht at Speak Now, Regret Later:

In the winter of 2015, I stood before the largest gathering of social psychologists in the world to accept one of the field’s highest honours. My collaborators and I were being celebrated for our theory about willpower—a theory I’d spent many years refining. For a kid who grew up with empty bookshelves, this should have been a moment of triumph [1].

Instead, I felt like a fraud.

At that same conference, I had to confront an uncomfortable truth: the foundation of our celebrated paper was crumbling. Ego depletion—the once-famous idea that self-control relies on a finite resource that can be depleted through use—wasn’t real. That award? It was like winning a Nobel prize for developing the frontal lobotomy as a treatment for mental illness; and, yes, that really happened.

This isn’t just another story about failed replications or p-hacking (though those shenanigans will make an appearance). It’s a story about what happens when we fall in love with our theories more than the truth. The replication crisis didn’t just shake the foundations of psychology; it shook those of us who had built our careers on ideas that no longer held up to scrutiny.

More here.

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Laura Kiniry in Smithsonian Magazine:

When the Cold War ended in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union, it greatly reduced the threat of global nuclear war. But on January 25, 1995, that threat once again came front and center when Russian officers mistook a Norwegian rocket sent to study the aurora borealis for a weapon of mass destruction.

While not as well known as the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, the “Norwegian rocket incident” is considered one of the world’s closest brushes with nuclear war.

In the early morning hours of January 25, a team of Norwegian and American scientists launched a Black Brant XII four-stage sounding rocket from Norway’s Andoya Rocket Range, a launch site off the country’s northwestern coast. Its purpose: to study the northern lights over Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago in the Arctic Ocean.

Although the scientists had notified dozens of countries, including Russia, in advance of their high-altitude scientific experiment, the information never made its way to Russia’s radar technicians.

More here.

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Emma Stoye in Nature:

Powerhouses of the cell. This video of a human bone-cancer cell shows its three nuclei (blue —probably the result of failed cell divisions), actin cytoskeleton (red) and a network of moving mitochondria (yellow).

More here.

Sojourner Truth in LFJ:

I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman?

…Then that little man in black there, he says women can’t have as much rights as men, ’cause Christ wasn’t a woman! Where did your Christ come from? Where did your Christ come from? From God and a woman! Man had nothing to do with Him.

If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women together ought to be able to turn it back, and get it right side up again!

And now they is asking to do it, the men better let them.

Obliged to you for hearing me, and now old Sojourner ain’t got nothing more to say.

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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Cédric Durand in Sidecar:

In Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities (1930), set in Vienna on the eve of the First World War, the army general Stumm von Bordwehr asks, ‘How can those directly involved in what’s happening know beforehand whether it will turn out to be a great event?’ His answer is that ‘all they can do is pretend to themselves that it is! If I may indulge in a paradox, I’d say that the history of the world is written before it happens; it always starts off as a kind of gossip.’ Last week, with Donald Trump’s return to power, gossip swirled as the giants of the tech industry gathered at his inauguration. Front-row seats were reserved for Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Google’s Sundar Pichai and Tesla’s Elon Musk, with Apple’s Tim Cook, Open AI’s Sam Altman and Tik Tok’s Shou Zi Chew sitting further back. Only a few years ago, the vast majority of these billionaires were outspoken supporters of Biden and the Democrats. ‘They were all with him’, Trump recalled, ‘every one of them, and now they’re all with me’. The crucial question concerns the nature of this realignment: is it a simple opportunistic turnaround, within the same systemic parameters? Or is this a moment of rupture worthy of being called a great event in history? Let us risk this second hypothesis.

More here.

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Henry Wismayer in Noema:

On a tawny hillside in central Tuscany, in a compound just 20 miles west of Siena’s medieval piazzas, Francesco Cannata was drilling for energy. Looming behind him was a red and white derrick, 80 feet tall, surrounded by trucks and heavy machinery. For three months, Cannata and his team had been at work sinking a diamond drill bit through the carbonates and dolomites of the Tuscan continental crust.

More here.

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Kate Mackenzie , Tim Sahay, and Lara Merling over at Polycrisis:

The United States will be a source of chaos and volatility for the next several years. The first month of 2025 has set the scene. Events so far have included imperial gangsterism against both a poor Latin American country (Colombia) and a rich northern European one (Denmark); a long-overdue ceasefire ending a genocidal military campaign (Gaza); the most expensive natural disaster in US history with climate-fuelled wildfires destroying homes (California); a trillion dollar sell off in the AI bubble in reaction to a Chinese firm’s innovation from behind the chips blockade; and the outbreak of a virus (H5N1) that has killed hundreds of millions of US poultry, sending egg prices soaring and raising concerns among scientists of another pandemic. OK, doomer.

It is hard to predict where exactly the administration’s stated goals of deporting immigrants, solidifying dollar strength, restoring trade surpluses, and maintaining low inflation will land—or how they may cause friction with the underlying agenda of authoritarian kleptocracy. Searching for a clearly defined, stably coherent ideology of the Trump administration may be a fool’s errand. In any case, it’s not as though the US has been known for providing stable, benevolent, or far-sighted hegemony; the rest of the world has been adjusting to an increasingly erratic US for many years.

But if a coherent worldview is out of reach, there are still patterns to be discerned in the order being formed around Trump, and the ways in which the rest of the world is bound to respond.

More here.

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Jennifer Szalai in The New York Times:

In “Open Socrates,” Agnes Callard suggests that self-improvement, at least as we usually understand the term, isn’t so much a matter of willpower, but of ideas. It’s not that we are weak-willed creatures, who know what “the good” is and then fail to pursue it; it’s that we haven’t given enough thought to what “the good” is in the first place. “The hard work of struggling to be a good, virtuous, ethical person” is, “first and foremost, intellectual work,” she writes.

…Callard’s name may be familiar to those who have read a profile of her in The New Yorker. She left her first marriage, to another philosopher, to marry a graduate student, also a philosopher. She talks as if love is an ecstatically intellectual pursuit, at least when it’s going well. In “Open Socrates,” she describes how we can get so caught up in our own thoughts that we don’t let evidence from the world in; another person can reveal to us our own blind spots, nudging us just so in order to see what we were missing. Socratic inquiry, with its emphasis on dialogue, reveals thinking as a communal process: “In the presence of others, something becomes possible that isn’t possible when you are alone.”

More here.

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From ASLAH:

The 2025 Black History Month theme, African Americans and Labor, focuses on the various and profound ways that work and working of all kinds – free and unfree, skilled, and unskilled, vocational and voluntary – intersect with the collective experiences of Black people. Indeed, work is at the very center of much of Black history and culture. Be it the traditional agricultural labor of enslaved Africans that fed Low Country colonies, debates among Black educators on the importance of vocational training, self-help strategies and entrepreneurship in Black communities, or organized labor’s role in fighting both economic and social injustice, Black people’s work has been transformational throughout the U.S., Africa, and the Diaspora. The 2025 Black History Month theme, “African Americans and Labor,” sets out to highlight and celebrate the potent impact of this work.

…2025 marks the 100-year anniversary of the creation of Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and Maids by labor organizer and civil rights activist A. Philip Randolph, which was the first Black union to receive a charter in the American Federation of Labor. Martin Luther King, Jr incorporated issues outlined by Randolph’s March on Washington Movement such as economic justice into the Poor People’s Campaign, which he established in 1967. For King, it was a priority for Black people to be considered full citizens.

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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No Method of Self-knowledge

Seeking a method invariably implies desire
to attain a result which is what we want.

We follow authority – if not of a person,
then of a system, an ideology, because
we want a result that will be satisfactory,
and give us security.

We really do not want to understand ourselves,
our impulses and reactions, the whole process
of our thinking, the conscious as well as the unconscious;
we would rather pursue systems that assure us
results. But the pursuit of a system is invariably
the outcome of our desire for security, for certainty,
which result is to not understand oneself.

When we follow a method, we must have authorities
– the teacher, the guru, the savior, the Master
who will guarantee us what we desire,
which is surely not the way of self-knowledge.

Authority prevents the understanding
of oneself,  does it not?

Under the shelter of authority, a guide,
you may temporarily have a sense of security,
of well-being, but that is not an understanding
of the whole process of oneself.

Authority in its very nature prevents
full awareness of oneself and therefore
destroys freedom, in freedom alone
can there be creativity.

There can be creativity
only through self-knowledge.

by Krishnamurti
from The Book of Life

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Matthew Wills at JSTOR Daily:

“There can be few workplaces quite as zany as a wrestling ring,” writes sociologist Gregory Hollin in his study of “precarious workers, post-truth politics, and inauthentic activism” in the professional wrestling entertainment business.

While warfare is the preferred metaphor for boxing, labor is the actual metaphor of choice for pro-wrestling. Pro-wrestlers are “workers” who “sell” their performances and their responses to their co-workers’ performances, acting out rage or pain, etc.; the script or storyline of the performance is “a work”; second-string performers are “jobbers.”

In a neoliberal economy where everyone is supposed to be their own brand, an independent contractor at the mercy of corporate power, the actual labor of pro-wrestling leaves much to be desired. It’s as precarious as any in the gig-economy, with low wages and little protective regulation or union support. Payment for a match in northern England, the site of Hollin’s field work in 2019, was £20 (about $25 today), with wrestlers expected to volunteer several hours beforehand setting up the venue. One of Hollin’s subjects, a university graduate with a degree in theater, reported working forty-eight matches in twenty-six days traveling the “length and breadth of the British Isles.”

More here.

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Solomon Adams at Quanta:

Calculus is a powerful mathematical tool. But for hundreds of years after its invention in the 17th century, it stood on a shaky foundation. Its core concepts were rooted in intuition and informal arguments, rather than precise, formal definitions.

Two schools of thought emerged in response, according to Michael Barany(opens a new tab), a historian of math and science at the University of Edinburgh. French mathematicians were by and large content to keep going. They were more concerned with applying calculus to problems in physics — using it to compute the trajectories of planets, for instance, or to study the behavior of electric currents. But by the 19th century, German mathematicians had begun to tear things down. They set out to find counterexamples that would undermine long-held assumptions, and eventually used those counterexamples to put calculus on more stable and durable footing.

One of these mathematicians was Karl Weierstrass.

More here.

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Jeannette Cooperman at The Common Reader:

I used to love to pray. Making myself small, I felt a calm expanse, a largeness, surrounding me. Kneeling was a letting go, giving in to gravity so there was no longer any distance to fall. I echoed the novenas my grandmother made, trusting their magic numbers and incantations. The saints were lined up waiting to ease our particular hardships—St. Francis called in for our puppy’s bout with distemper; St. Anthony for all the stuff I lost; St. Jude for the impossible. Nothing was impossible with God. And God was always there, just waiting to be asked, implored, begged, bargained with, praised, adored, or thanked.

Now a friend receives a terrifying diagnosis and says, “Pray for me,” and I freeze. Saying, “You’ll be in my thoughts” feels lame. Saying, “I don’t believe in petitionary prayer” feels cold and rude; my ideological struggle is not the point here. If I can do something practical—bring a casserole, drive a friend to the hospital, watch the kids—I focus on that. But often there is nothing to do but pray.

I do try. The words come—old words, learned in childhood—and then stammer to a halt, because it feels dishonest to repeat these easy words when I am so far from the place where I learned them.

William James said that without prayer, there can be no religion. But if you have moved away from organized religion, can there still be prayer?

More here.

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I Have This Way of Being

I have this, and this isn’t a mouth
           full of the names of odd flowers

I’ve grown in secret.
           I know none of these by name

but have this garden now,
           and pastel somethings bloom

near the others and others.
           I have this trowel, these overalls,

this ridiculous hat now.
           This isn’t a lung full of air.

Not a fist full of weeds that rise
           yellow then white then windswept.

This is little more than a way
           to kneel and fill gloves with sweat,

so that the trowel in my hand
           will have something to push against,

rather, something to push
           against that it knows will bend

and give and return as sprout
           and petal and sepal and bloom.

Jamaal May

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Caitlín Doherty at Harper’s Magazine:

Davos is an archetypal Swiss mountain town. With its smattering of church spires rising above a low skyline of blocky, pastel-colored condominiums and its pyramidal structure of councils (large, small, and school), for fifty-one weeks of the year it seems the very model of a self-contained Alpine community. But on the first day of the forum, as I made my way toward the Congress Centre (the cuboid wooden structure, opened in 1969, where the official meetings take place), signs of the command of global capital—however subtle—accumulated quickly.

Droves of delegates arriving for the WEF were disembarking from their trains via a temporary railway platform that had been built halfway between the permanent Davos Dorf and Davos Platz stations that bookend the town. A secondhand shop was shuttered, with a note in the window reading wef: geschlossen. Next to a pair of billboards advertising discount ski gear was another bearing the image of Narendra Modi inviting you to immerse in india’s vibrant culture through technology. A Methodist church displayed a banner of Christ washing a disciple’s feet, inscribed with the words wirtschaft soll menschen dienen! (“the economy should serve the people!”); several streets away, its Evangelical counterpart had rebranded for the week as a crypto “sanctuary.”

more here.

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J.D. Daniels at The Paris Review:

My father wanted to be a gym teacher before his life drove him down another path. The ghost of his ambition has played a part in how much the gym and my gym teachers have meant to me.

Two examples: One. Have you read J. G. Ballard’s 1968 short story “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan”? When Ronald Reagan, whom I would actually prefer not to fuck, revived the Presidential Physical Fitness Test, the chin-up requirement was an intimidating challenge for the kids at my elementary school.

But my father had been the pull-up champion of his Air Force unit and I’d always had a bar and brackets in my bedroom doorway, not for exercise but as something to play on and have fun with. Fat Geoff and Tall Jeff and Eric and Dena and Tony and Jenny and Jamie and Matt and Amy and Ryan and Janelle (who was as tall as a giraffe, hence her nickname “Girelle”) and Little Brad and Sara and Big Peaky and Little Peaky and Chad and Brooke would come over, and when we weren’t playing Atari we would do skin-the-cats or Tarzan swings on a sturdy yellow tie strap my father had brought home from the dealership. I was not intimidated by the bar.

more here.

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Thomas Westerholm in Newsweek:

Older adults whose cholesterol levels change over time might be tied to a greater risk of dementia, according to a new study.

Researchers from Monash University in Australia published a study in Neurology conducted on nearly 10,000 participants with an average age of 74. The researchers measured cholesterol levels at the beginning of the study and over the course of three more visits, following the participants for more than five years.

‘A new biomarker’

They found that regardless of the cholesterol level, changes in cholesterol level were linked to higher risk of dementia. “These results suggest that fluctuating cholesterol, measured annually, may be a new biomarker for identifying people at risk of dementia, providing more information than the actual cholesterol levels measured at a single time point,” study author Zhen Zhou said in a press release.

More here.

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