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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Shelly Fan in Singularity Hub:

Although mice with two dads have been born before, scientists used a completely different strategy in this study, which also provided insights into a reproductive mystery. In a process called “imprinting,” some genes in embryos are switched on or off depending on whether they come from the biological mom or dad. Problems with imprinting often damage embryos, halting their growth.

In the new study, the team hunted down imprinted genes in embryos made from same-sex parents, drawing an intricate “fingerprint” of their patterns. They then zeroed in on 20 genes and tinkered with them using the gene-editing tool CRISPR. Hundreds of experiments later, the edited embryos—made from two male donors—led to the birth of seven pups that grew to adulthood. Imprinting doesn’t just affect reproduction.

More here.

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David Enrich in the New York Times:

After a financial crisis torpedoed the U.S. economy in 2008, the public clamored for accountability. Millions had lost their homes and livelihoods. Crimes had been committed. Surely, the bankers, brokers and investors who had precipitated and profited from this collapse would be brought to justice.

Nope. While a few midlevel bank employees were prosecuted, the architects of a rotten system generally escaped with their nine-figure fortunes intact. It was not long afterward that Donald Trump began his rise to power, and many observers pointed to the hangover from the 2008 crisis, and the impunity that characterized it, as part of his appeal.

In “The Killing Fields of East New York,” Stacy Horn examines another, long forgotten financial crisis — one with a very different outcome.

More here.

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Graham Farmelo in Nature:

‘Big Steve,’ his students called him. Steven Weinberg was not physically imposing, but was an intellectually dominant and much-revered figure in the scientific community and on the public stage. One of the most distinguished theoretical physicists of the past 75 years, Weinberg dedicated his professional life to leading what he described as the ‘grand enterprise’ of seeking the bedrock laws of nature that underpin the workings of the Universe. He looked the part, too — at physics conferences, he was often the only participant wearing a suit and tie.

When he died in 2021, he was only a few months away from completing his memoir, a roughly chronological account of his life up to the 1990s, with his perspective on the development of fundamental physics over the past century. Cambridge University Press has now published the book, which is written for a wide audience, featuring neither unexplained jargon nor even a single equation.

His account of his formative years as a boy from the Bronx, a borough of New York City, is a fascinating glimpse into the influences that shaped him.

More here.

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Dario Amodei, CEO Anthropic, at his own website:

A few weeks ago I made the case for stronger US export controls on chips to China. Since then DeepSeek, a Chinese AI company, has managed to — at least in some respects — come close to the performance of US frontier AI models at lower cost.

Here, I won’t focus on whether DeepSeek is or isn’t a threat to US AI companies like Anthropic (although I do believe many of the claims about their threat to US AI leadership are greatly overstated). Instead, I’ll focus on whether DeepSeek’s releases undermine the case for those export control policies on chips. I don’t think they do. In fact, I think they make export control policies even more existentially important than they were a week ago.

Export controls serve a vital purpose: keeping democratic nations at the forefront of AI development. To be clear, they’re not a way to duck the competition between the US and China. In the end, AI companies in the US and other democracies must have better models than those in China if we want to prevail. But we shouldn’t hand the Chinese Communist Party technological advantages when we don’t have to.

More here.

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Veronique Greenwood in Harvard Magazine:

One story David Mooney tells starts with a slug. “This slug does a really good job of creating a mucus that allows it to stick really tightly, so predators can’t just peel it off and eat it,” he says. The mucus, a marvelous material, turns out to consist of a springy mesh made of sugars and proteins threaded through each other. When pushed with a finger, the energy disperses through the mesh, rather than tearing it, indicating serious toughness. There’s plenty of water in there, too, Mooney points out. That’s handy, because if you want a substance to stick to your inner organs, it’s more convenient if you know it can withstand the damp.

Mooney is not a slug biologist. He is in fact the Pinkas Family professor of bioengineering, a founding faculty member of Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, and the holder of numerous patents on subjects ranging from recipes for cancer vaccines to ways to guide drugs through the body (see “Fighting Disease in Situ,” May-June 2009, page 10, and “Biological Vaccine Factories,” January-February 2021, page 9). But he is a strong proponent of observation. One researcher in his lab realized that the slug mucus strongly resembled material another group member had been exploring some years before.

More here.

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Sammi Caramela in Vice:

Did you know your gut microbiome can impact various aspects of your health—including your mental and emotional well-being? A healthier biome means a healthier you, and according to professionals, all it takes is a few simple lifestyle changes. Cleveland Clinic defines a gut microbiome as “a microscopic world within the world of your larger body. The trillions of microorganisms that live there affect each other and their environment in various ways. They also appear to influence many aspects of your overall health, both within your digestive system and outside of it.” Basically, your gut has its own biome filled with microscopic organisms, bacteria, viruses, fungi, and parasites. And when there’s a disruption in the balance of good and bad organisms within your gut, you can experience a ton of concerning health issues.

Doctors at UCLA Health recommend, first and foremost, focusing on eating whole foods, exercising, spending time outdoors, getting sufficient sleep, and managing stress.

More here.

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