Yascha Mounk at his own Substack:
Yascha Mounk: You have an interesting and distinguished political career and have also made a lot of forceful arguments in the public sphere. One of the interesting contributions you’ve made recently is to say that we live in a moment of “technofeudalism.”
To those of my listeners who think that’s a catchy phrase but aren’t quite sure what it means, what does that entail? What makes this moment an instance of technofeudalism?
Yanis Varoufakis: Well, to get to that point we have to agree on where we were. Capitalism, as far as I’m concerned, is a socioeconomic mode of production that came out of feudalism and what characterises it is that we shifted from a society where power stemmed from owning land, land ownership granting you the extractive power to amass economic rent from your peasants and from vassals and so on to a situation where power stemmed from owning not the land, per se, but the machines—the electricity networks, railway networks and so forth. And then your wealth accumulation took the form of accumulating profits, which is not at all the same as rents.
The point I’m making, to cut a very long story short, is that in the last 10 years after the 2008 crisis, we have now shifted to another socioeconomic mode of production where it is the ownership of a particular mutation of capital which I call cloud capital (it’s what lives in our phones, it’s algorithmic capital, digital capital) is a very different, very brand new, unprecedented form of capital.
More here.
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There are certain places in the world where the boundaries between past and present seem porous, almost arbitrary. The air is cool and quiet in the mornings on the Knepp estate in Sussex, England — quiet, that is, except for the lilt of birdsong and the rumbling beat of hooves. The landscape is one of fields and copses, of dense, tangled shrubbery and shifting, murky pools. The green sward is low and neatly cropped, churned up in many places by the tread of heavy animals. The decade is the 2020s, but it might as well be the 1820s — or a far more ancient era yet. A woman gazing out over the Knepp estate one misty morning might imagine herself looking over a medieval common, or even a vista out of the long-lost Neolithic, and her intuition would not be much wrong. Yet at Knepp, of all places, this deep sense of antiquity is an illusion.
W
THIS book made me, by turn, wince, squirm, smile wryly, and gasp in surprise and in horror. It is not for the fainthearted. King has produced a comprehensive and detailed historical account of the way in which four different parts of women’s bodies — breasts, clitoris, hymen, and womb — have been viewed, interpreted, and treated, by society, medicine, and the Church, and mainly by men. She reaches back into classical times and around the globe to other than Western civilisations.
One of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s remarkable early accomplishments was the long poem that lent its title to his 1961 collection of poetry, La Religione del mio tempo, or “The Religion of My Time.” And while religion was many things to Pasolini, what he was most religiously devoted to might have been the idea of being of his time. His writing—whether in the form of poetry, fiction or polemic, among which he passionately blurred the distinctions—staked a great deal on immediacy. In this sense it was close to speech: an intervention in the moment as much as a message for futurity.
Let’s call the student R. The principal of the school I was visiting said to others in the room soon after I arrived in her office, “Where is R.? Oh, he has a story to tell you.”
Scientists have long known that DNA-copying systems make the occasional blunder — that’s how cancers often start — but only in recent years has technology been sensitive enough to catalog every genetic booboo. And it’s revealed we’re riddled with errors. Every human being is a vast mosaic of cells that are mostly identical, but different here or there, from one cell or group of cells to the next.
Washington is filled with lobbying offices and fund-raisers because powerful interests believe something is gained when dollars are spent. They are right. We have come to expect and accept a grotesque level of daily corruption in American politics — abetted by a series of Supreme Court rulings that give money the protections of speech and by congressional Republicans who have fought even modest campaign finance reforms. But we have at least some rules to limit money’s power in politics and track its movements.
We all know that time seems to pass at different speeds in different situations. For example, time appears to go slowly when we travel to unfamiliar places. A week in a foreign country seems much longer than a week at home. Time also seems to pass slowly when we are bored or
Every sentence of “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities” was elegant and foreboding. The mother is having second thoughts; the father is exaggerating his fortune. Delusions of grandeur, and Delmore hasn’t even been conceived. There is no affection here. Regrets only.
Confusion and anxiety is rippling through the US health-research community this week following 
THE EDITORS OF VERGE Books, Peter O’Leary and John Tipton, continue to lavish love on books wholly deserving of the care. Take Joseph Donahue’s two-volume Terra Lucida XIII–XXI (2024) as the most current example: Musica Callada and Near Star come housed in a box clad in a deep-loam brown cloth, the color of leaf-rot, fungal fecundity itself. Such care, if it’s truly meaningful, is so only because it adorns a poetry whose nature shares the same cosmic ethic. Joseph Donahue is a poet for whom, couplet by couplet, poetry is the principal way of tuning a life to the deeper orders of the world, where even death’s irreparable rift is a complement to life’s wild loveliness. For Donahue, the poem is the primary tool for understanding the weird work living is.
DALLAS — The place where the dead may be brought back to life is a drab, single-story building in an office park next to a semitruck lot. Inside, between rows of incubators and microscopes, Beth Shapiro and her team are attempting a feat straight out of science fiction: reviving the dodo, a bird that’s been extinct for more than three centuries. A growing group of scientists is trying to bring back extinct animals, an idea that is drawing closer than ever due to recent advances in gene editing.