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Natalie Haddad at Hyperallergic:

“Nature created him as a gift to the world,” wrote Giorgio Vasari of Raphael in the 16th-century compendium The Lives of the Artists. Roughly 500 years later, the sentiment still holds true. Born in 1483 in Urbino, Italy, a small center of 15th and 16th-century art and culture, Raphael embodies the ideal of the Renaissance man: In his 37 years, he established himself as a painter rivaling Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, ran a thriving studio, and expanded into architecture and design. Yet it’s the humanism of his art, reflecting his own empathic personality, that continues to resonate across time and space.

Sublime Poetry, opening this weekend at the Metropolitan Museum, is the first comprehensive Raphael survey in the United States, encompassing his childhood apprenticeships through his late-life fame and accomplishments. If that seems surprising, consider the logistics involved in securing more than 170 works by the Renaissance master from over 60 global collections, ranging from celebrated masterpieces such as “The Virgin and Child with the Infant Saint John the Baptist in a Landscape (The Alba Madonna)” (1509–11) to the fragile drawings that were the cornerstone of his practice, like the Ashmolean Museum’s beguiling “Portrait of a Young Boy (Presumed to be a Self-Portrait)” (c. 1500) and the Louvre’s breathtaking “Saint Catherine of Alexandria in Three-Quarter Length” (c. 1507).

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In Solitude

In solitude, we remain
face to face with the
naked being of things.
And yet we find that the
nakedness of reality,
which we have feared,
is neither a matter of
terror nor of shame.

It is clothed in the friendly
communion of silence, and this
silence is related to love.

The world our words have tried to classify,
to control, and even to despise
(because they could not contain it)
comes close to us, for silence
teaches us to know reality
by respecting it where words
have defiled it . . .

by Thomas Merton
from Poetic Outlaws

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Shelby Bradford in The Scientist:

Worldwide, more than 330 million people have depression, with major depressive disorder representing one of the most common psychiatric disorders in clinics. Up to 30 percent of these patients don’t have improved mood after trying two different medications, at which point their provider may consider their condition to be treatment-resistant depression.¹

In addition to altered mood, people with depression also often experience physiological symptoms, such as sleep problems, digestive disorders, and changes to their blood pressure or heart rate. However, these symptoms also occur when the autonomic nervous system, responsible for maintaining normal bodily functions through the sympathetic and parasympathetic branches, is dysfunctional. Dysregulation in this system can lead to oxidative stress that can strain mitochondria and decrease cardiac function, reducing proper blood circulation.

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Mark Jarman at the Hudson Review:

By the end of Heaney’s life, all literary laurels became destined for him and created a lore of fame, from the rhyming epithet “Famous Seamus,” said to have been coined by the English poet James Fenton, and anecdotes of his having to apologize once again to another worthy and deserving Irish poet when the award came instead and once again to Famous Seamus. I have heard the Irish poet Ciaran Carson speak of this dilemma. And I have heard Heaney’s friend Michael Longley who tells of an exchange with an English Don. “How do you feel about the Heaney phenomenon?” said Don asked Longley. To which Longley replied, “Envious.”
 
Heaney the poet is more the heir to Robert Lowell than to W. B. Yeats, though Lowell himself might be said to be heir to Yeats. Read Heaney’s poems and see the way the tones and textures of Heaney’s life collect sound and form not only from Lowell’s Life Studies but also from Theodore Roethke’s lyric sequences. By mid century the lyric in English had aspired to, in Hart Crane’s famous phrase, new thresholds, new anatomies.

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Theodore Martin at LitHub:

It has long been conventional for crime novelists to describe killers using the language of insanity, madness, and mental illness. But in the crime novels of the 1990s, another term keeps cropping up: sick. The murderer in Blanche on the Lam is “sick….Very sick.” In A Walk among the Tombstones, Block’s detective Matt Scudder decides that the serial killers are either “sick…or evil…take your pick.” In L.A. Confidential, the serial killer Douglas Dieterling isn’t mad, he’s “quite physiologically ill. He gets brain inflammations periodically.” The physiological effects of brain inflammation are also mentioned in White Butterfly, where the big reveal about serial killer J.T. Saunders is that he suffers from syphilis, which has affected his brain. As one of Mosley’s characters explains, “VD can make you insane.” Cornwell makes the sickness more literal still. The killer in All That Remains is identified only after it is discovered that he suffers from “aplastic anemia.”

Cornwell had used this device before. In her debut novel Postmortem (1990), Kay Scarpetta finds herself debating the health status of the serial killer she’s pursuing. “He isn’t sick, okay?” Scarpetta insists. “He’s antisocial, he’s evil.” Her colleague disagrees: “Has to be some kind of sickness. He knows he’s sick.”

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Katherine Rochester at Artforum:

IN 1974, a strand of hair twirled in a porcelain sink in room 503 of the Chelsea Hotel. It belonged to an artist named Bettina, who photographed its sinuous formations as water jostled it around. The resulting suite of sixty-three gelatin silver prints—Two Hours in the Life of One Hair Photographed in the Sink at One Minute Intervals While Agitated by Running Water—represented a selection from the 120 images she would have snapped given the stated parameters of the exercise. In fact, the series was vaster still, extending both backward and forward in time via works that explored organic forms through sundry media. Terminal Germination/Paris, ca. 1970, a black-and-white photocopy that preceded the photographs, comprised eight xeroxed drawings of morphing hair arranged in a two-by-four grid. Some vignettes had the grainy shading of excessive toner powder, while others were bleached out. Bettina followed these in 1971 with a group of wooden sculptures and line drawings exploring similar arabesque shapes. In the 1983–84 series “Retake/Outtake; Filmtwists,” she imagined a suite of monumental sculptures (never fabricated) for the city of Los Angeles, transforming the motif of the hair into ribbons of loosely woven metal, suggesting strips of unspooled celluloid.

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Nobuko Nakano in The Guardian:

When the founder of Panasonic, Kōnosuke Matsushita, was asked what quality he valued most in job candidates, his answer baffled everyone: whether they were lucky. Not their credentials, not their intelligence, not their experience. Luck. For years, this anecdote struck me as charmingly eccentric – the kind of thing a titan of industry gets away with saying because nobody around them dares to laugh. Then I began studying the neuroscience of fortunate people, and I stopped laughing, too.

What my research has revealed is that luck, far from being a roll of the cosmic dice, operates through identifiable patterns of brain chemistry and behaviour. The consistently lucky are not blessed by fate. They are running different neurological software – and the remarkable thing is that this software can be installed.

Consider what happens when someone simply declares: “I am a lucky person.” It sounds like wishful thinking. But brain imaging tells a different story.

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Ethan Mollick at One Useful Thing:

Instead of having companies build a specialized interface for every kind of work, the AI generates the right interface on the fly. I suspect the future isn’t one interface to rule them all. It’s AI that generates the right interface for the moment, an agent on your desktop, a chart in a conversation, a custom app to solve a problem. We’re moving from adapting to the AI’s interface to the AI adapting its interface to you.

AI capability has been running ahead of AI accessibility. The models have been smart enough to do extraordinary things for a while now, but we’ve been making people access that intelligence through chatbots. And, as that cognitive load research shows, the chatbot format is actively working against them. As interfaces improve, we’re going to see what happens when a much larger number of people can actually use what AI is capable of.

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Joseph Lawler in The New Atlantis:

Think of what the typical American city looks like today: its hollowed-out core dotted with parking lots, its run-down inner-city neighborhoods, its sprawl.

How did this happen? Cities weren’t like this a hundred years ago. They were real cities in the sense in which most people would understand the word, with jobs, businesses, houses, churches, and every other institution related to daily life concentrated around a dense center. Today, cities are almost the inverse of that, with a large population settled out in sprawl, and a hollowed-out center where far fewer people live.

Conversations about this transformation typically collapse into a focus on attitudes about cars. On one extreme, urbanists blame an American fetish for SUVs and highway construction for our lack of charming walkable neighborhoods and the destruction of areas that might have developed into such places. On the other extreme, suburbanists view urbanists as anti-car fanatics who want to use government policy to choke off the low-density single-family housing development that has characterized America since World War II.

What they both tend to overlook is that almost all Americans today have spent their entire lives under a set of federal laws and rules that have helped hollow out the cores of our cities.

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Alexandra Witze in Nature:

If all goes to plan, as soon as tomorrow, NASA will launch four people on a journey around the Moon. The mission, known as Artemis II, would be the first time humans have left Earth’s protective environment and travelled into deep space since the US Apollo programme, which ended more than half a century ago. And it could carry its astronauts farther from Earth than any humans have ever travelled.

Artemis II is one in a series of missions that ultimately aim to build humanity’s first permanent base on the Moon. This mission is supposed to test the rocket, crew capsule and other space-flight hardware that NASA wants to use to land humans on the lunar surface in the coming years. During their nearly ten-day journey to the Moon and back, astronauts plan to run experiments that will set the stage for future explorers.

“What we’re trying to do is not pick up where Apollo left off, but to use our decades of experience and knowledge and planning to do this sustainable presence on the Moon — and then to do science alongside of that,” says Barbara Cohen, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

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Shelly Fan in Singularity Hub:

A mixture of bacteria lounge in a dish. Like the bugs populating our guts, most are benign or beneficial. But a deadly strain hides among them. These bacteria can easily escape last-line antibiotics, rapidly spread, and cause mayhem. But in this case, a single dose of genetically engineered cells hunts them down and wipes out nearly the entire population in a day, while leaving all the other harmless cells alone.

This strategy, called minicell therapy, fights fire with fire: Researchers engineer hunter cells by stripping bacteria of the ability to replicate and then genetically loading them up with proteins to home in on dangerous foes. The cells grab their targets and inject toxins into them, releasing a hurricane of chemicals that causes the bacteria’s insides to collapse.

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Paterson: Early Winter, ’78’

—for Ed Smith

I will see you once again
on the long silver train
people call “night”.

The sizzling green neon
of Van Houten Ave. pizzeria
will smooth the wrinkles
of your corduroy coat

& it’ll be what we expected
of that time and of that place
&, so, let it all slide into
the crisp russet Meadowlands.

Sun will rise again on the good friends
we once had, now dreaming on the sly
as we cash in the empties from our karma
& become an animation of two guys
walking through the paradise
that New Jersey once was.

by Joel Lewis
from The Rutherford Red Wheelbarrow, 2010

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Hannah Katznelson at The Hedgehog Review:

At the beginning of On the Nature of Things, a sort of textbook of Epicurean philosophy, the Roman poet Lucretius explains his choice to write in verse by comparing his poem to a cup of bitter medicine whose rim has been smeared with honey. Just as young patients will heal quicker if they enjoy taking their medicine, young students will benefit from encountering Epicurus’s difficult but edifying doctrine in a form they find pleasurable, even if that pleasure is only “lip-deep.” Arnoud S.Q. Visser’s On Pedantry: A Cultural History of the Know-It-All, a book about how intellectuals ranging from Socrates to Dr. Strangelove have made themselves disliked, takes a similar view of intellectual effort and enjoyment. The book is full of useful considerations for pedants hoping to be less irritating, but Visser ultimately considers that irritation the cost of doing business: Worthwhile intellectual work is unavoidably challenging, and sometimes even unpleasant.

Visser, an intellectual historian and scholar of Renaissance humanism at Utrecht University who has been as prolific writing for popular audiences as for academic ones, does a wonderful job of candy-coating this bitter pill. On Pedantry is relaxed and inviting; it is economical but judicious with historical detail, and discreet in its erudition.

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Kevin T Baker in The Guardian:

On the first morning of Operation Epic Fury, 28 February 2026, American forces struck the Shajareh Tayyebeh primary school in Minab, in southern Iran, hitting the building at least two times during the morning session. American forces killed between 175 and 180 people, most of them girls between the ages of seven and 12.

Within days, the question that organised the coverage was whether Claude, a chatbot made by Anthropic, had selected the school as a target. Congress wrote to the US secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, about the extent of AI use in the strikes. The New Yorker magazine asked whether Claude could be trusted to obey orders in combat, whether it might resort to blackmail as a self-preservation strategy, and whether the Pentagon’s chief concern should be that the chatbot had a personality. Almost none of this had any relationship to reality. The targeting for Operation Epic Fury ran on a system called Maven. Nobody was arguing about Maven.

Eight years ago, Maven was the most contested project in Silicon Valley. In 2018, more than 4,000 Google employees signed a letter opposing the company’s contract to build artificial intelligence for the Pentagon’s targeting systems. Workers organised a walk out. Engineers quit. And Google ultimately abandoned the contract. Palantir Technologies, a data analytics company and defence contractor co-founded by Peter Thiel, took it over…

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