Daniel Bessner in The Nation:

Noam Chomsky is the most famous critic of US empire in the world. No single living intellectual comes close. Even John Mearsheimer, the international relations theorist well-known for his critiques of US foreign relations, can’t hold a candle to Chomsky: A Google Ngram search quickly reveals how many more times Chomsky’s name appears in English-language texts than Mearsheimer’s.

And Chomsky is not just one of the most cited writers on the subject of US foreign relations; he’s that rare scholar who has made the leap from academia to popular culture. His name appears in songs by the punk band NOFX (“And now I can’t sleep from years of apathy / All because I read a little Noam Chomsky”) and the comedian Bo Burnham (“My show is a little bit silly / And a little bit pretentious / Like Shakespeare’s willy / Or Noam Chomsky wearing a strap-on”). Robin Williams’s psychologist character in Good Will Hunting brings up Chomsky to demonstrate his intellectual bona fides to Will himself. And in my favorite reference, on the TV show Community, the character Britta—an annoying lefty poseur whose claim to fame is that she “lived in New York”—has a cat named Chomsky. If ordinary Americans know one critic of the American Empire, it’s almost certainly Chomsky.

Though he was trained as a linguist, it’s not especially surprising that Chomsky has become best known for his political opinions.

More here.

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January

i

The jays are commissars in uniform that rule
By evolutions ordinance. Its lesser birds
Survive haphazardly: the wrens are refugees,
And robins following the railroad south have veered
Toward destitution’s camp, where fields are deeply scrolled
And hushed by January’s harsh regime, and skies
Consolidate to cobalt under tungsten clouds.
A stenciling of dendrites drawn in photogravure
Has marred thee gray horizon. Now consumptive twigs
Display disease and poverty across its screen.
In drifts, the muffled trees like soldiers shake their coats,
Elbowed in bark as in gabardine, and the curse wind,
Rabbits fraying their cuffs, trailing threads away.
The valley shadows dust the snow with powder blue.
A crow concealed in arborvitae give the charge,
And thorns like firing pins repeat it, lifted limbs
Defy both weather and the order to submit—
A stand of minutemen, bareheaded, stamping for dawn.

ii

My father solemnly believed a God could live
Articulate in sumac and arbutus leaves;
That daily-witnessed death could be outrun
If once observed and written down. In sun, in rain,
I learned that duty and devotion are the same
When love and terror walk together. As the stream
Diverged, we stood on separate banks. He tried to show
Me where a red-eyed vireo might nest, the shy
Elusive whippoorwill might hide, but I could not
Distinguish anything except the wildest note
Of pity in their singing.

by Mellisa Green
from The Squanicook Eclogues
The Pen & Anvil Press, Boston, 2010

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Eric Cortellessa in Time Magazine:

Days before Donald Trump will return to the White House, Special Counsel Jack Smith relayed an unsettling message to the American people: He had unearthed enough evidence to potentially send the incoming President to prison.

The Justice Department released on Tuesday its final report on Smith’s charges alleging that Trump illegally conspired to overturn the 2020 election, saying that prosecutors secured the goods to convict Trump had his November victory not prevented the case from proceeding. “But for Mr. Trump’s election and imminent return to the presidency, the office assessed that the admissible evidence was sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction at trial,” the document says. The report amounts to a remarkable rebuke of someone soon to assume the powers of the presidency. While few of the findings were new—Trump’s schemes to remain in office after losing the 2020 election have been extensively chronicled through news reports, documentaries, and landmark congressional hearings—it’s yet another detailed account of how the President-elect waged an assault on American democracy and the U.S. government he will soon lead once again.

Smith’s team interviewed more than 250 people, obtained grand jury testimony from more than 55 witnesses, and said the findings of the House committee that probed the attack constituted “a small part of the office’s investigative record.” In the sprawling 137-page report, Smith unspools Trump’s efforts to block the peaceful transfer of power, from pressuring state and federal officials to nullify the election outcome to inciting a mob to ransack the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Smith accuses Trump of trying to obstruct the certification of Biden’s election “through fraud and deceit,” including by encouraging “violence against his perceived opponents” in the days and weeks leading up to the insurrectionist riot.

More here.

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Laura Tran in The Scientist:

Diet, weight, and metabolism are intricately linked, so studying their relationship is no easy task. People’s eating habits encompass a wide variety of foods, many of which are shared between different types of diets; this complexity makes it difficult to establish cause and effect. “What should you eat? What should you not eat?” mused Jonathan Long, a biochemist at Stanford University. To tackle this challenge, Long focuses on isolating single, chemically well-defined components of diets to better understand their impact on the body.

Taurine, an amino acid commonly found in meats, shellfish, and energy drinks, is a regular part of many diets. While humans naturally produce taurine, dietary taurine can support the immune system and improve cardiovascular health. It is often used as a supplement for weight loss or to enhance exercise performance. Given taurine’s involvement in various physiological functions, researchers have been keen to understand how it is metabolized in the body, as it is converted into different taurine-containing molecules. This prompted Long to explore its metabolic pathways and he homed in on an understudied taurine metabolite called N-acetyltaurine.¹

More here.

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Austin McCoy at Public Books:

For a weekend in May, rap artists Drake and Kendrick Lamar ignited a fierce battle that engulfed popular culture. Lamar struck first. On Future and Metro Boomin’s “Like That,” Lamar set the stage for a relentless exchange of songs and disses between Drake, Kendrick Lamar, J-Cole, and Rick Ross. Drake responded with “Push Ups” and the controversial “Taylor Made Freestyle,” where the rapper utilized verses from AI renditions of Tupac Shakur and Snoop Dogg. Nearly two weeks later, Lamar responded to Drake with “Euphoria” and “6:16 in LA.” From there, the two rappers exchanged disses—Lamar dropped “Meet the Grahams” minutes after Drake’s response to “Euphoria” and “6:16 in LA,” “Family Matters.” Lamar punctuated the beef with the scathing and catchy viral track “Not Like Us.”

The battle became a rare moment of monocultural spectacle. Suddenly, everyone seemed to weigh in on television, podcasts, and social media, whether through commenting, appropriating, explaining, or chastising. Pop singer Dua Lipa appeared on the May 4 episode of Saturday Night Live, just hours after Drake and Lamar exchanged disses, to explain the beef. Ubiquitous sports journalist Stephen A. Smith took to his podcast to register his disapproval of the two artists taking the conflict too far and urged them to cease the battle. The Biden-Harris social media team even used Lamar’s lyrics from “Euphoria” to mock former President Donald Trump.

The Drake–Kendrick battle also became a stage for analyzing the politics of hip-hop beefs and litigating their cultural work in our contemporary moment.

More here.

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Gale Pooley at Human Progress:

Swiss Re, one of the world’s leading reinsurers, analyzed liability claims related to collisions from 25.3 million fully autonomous miles driven by Waymo. They found that the Waymo driver demonstrated better safety performance than human-driven vehicles, with an 88 percent reduction in property damage claims and a 92 percent reduction in bodily injury claims.

The growth in autonomous driving safety can be measured as the inverse of the decrease in the number of claims. From this perspective, Waymo drivers are 10.4 times safer – 8.33 times safer in terms of property damage, and 12.5 times safer in terms of bodily injury. Since 2009, their safety factor has grown at a compound annual rate of 16.9 percent. At this rate, safety doubles roughly every five years.

More here.

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Gideon Lasco in Sapiens:

When I came to Amsterdam as a graduate student in 2012, I was surprised to find the city’s parks teeming with vibrant green feathers, red beaks, and bluish tails. The birds, which looked to me like parrots, were hard to miss. They congregated in Vondelpark, close to the city’s famed museums and canals, and also in Oosterpark, where I jogged daily. Even without seeing their verdant plumage, I could hear their distinctive squeaking noises in the air.

Parrots, as far as I knew, were tropical birds—and often elusive. Even in my home country, the Philippines, where there are a number of endemic parrots, they’re a rarity, visible only to birdwatchers and hikers who go deep into the forests. Indeed, only when I took up birdwatching myself did I see some of them in the wild, making it even more astonishing to see so many in Western Europe.

Soon I learned the birds were rose-ringed parakeets (Psittacula krameri), a type of parrot. The species is native to Africa and the Indian subcontinent, but the birds have made a home in Amsterdam for decades. In the dozen years I’ve been coming and going in the Netherlands, I’ve heard and read various urban legends about how the birds got established in the city.

More here.

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Nicola Jones in Nature:

The technology firm OpenAI made headlines last month when its latest experimental chatbot model, o3, achieved a high score on a test that marks progress towards artificial general intelligence (AGI). OpenAI’s o3 scored 87.5%, trouncing the previous best score for an artificial intelligence (AI) system of 55.5%.

This is “a genuine breakthrough”, says AI researcher François Chollet, who created the test, called Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus for Artificial General Intelligence (ARC-AGI)¹, in 2019 while working at Google, based in Mountain View, California. A high score on the test doesn’t mean that AGI — broadly defined as a computing system that can reason, plan and learn skills as well as humans can — has been achieved, Chollet says, but o3 is “absolutely” capable of reasoning and “has quite substantial generalization power”.

More here.

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Horse Latitudes

When they found them,
a cast hook pulling from the depths
an apparently endless iron chain,
it was just another mystery
to marvel at in an ocean
filled with more than enough.
But still the story spread
from ear to ear,
until finally, an old man
in a dockside bar
with a face more wood than skin
heard the tale
and laughted at the fools
who now call themselves sailors.

How could they understand
what they had found
without knowing why it was
they called that part of the Atlantic
by that old, almost forgotten name?

You see, long ago
Spanish Galleons,
filled with soldiers
greedy for the plunder
of the New World,
often found instead
the sickly winds
and Sargasso weeds
of a mariner’s oubliette
a part of the sea that loved
their ships so much it would not let them go.

Finally, near dying of thirst,
they would cast their own stallions
by the hundreds into the sea…

But sometimes, the leather harnesses
and the salt of the sea
might mix in some silent,
unknown alchemy
and the corpses would rise,
some even centuries afterwards,
still chained in great lines,
floating right near the edge
of the sun-dappled surface…

Imagine that, being some fisherman
or deckhand, and looking into the water
for one single instant to see
the bones of Spanish stallions,
somehow in the currents, moving
for an instant in stunning grace,
as if racing in a last charge,
chained to your brethren,
great manes flying,
hooves thundering as if to turn
the very ocean to earth,
in a race with no finish,
for it circles the very world.

by Brandon Whitehead
fromThieves, Pharaohs & Mexican Daredevils
Spartan Press

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Ed Simon at Hyperallergic:

When the Hollywood sign was first unveiled in 1923, it read “Hollywoodland.” Surrounded by coastal sage scrub, chaparral, and invasive and highly flammable eucalyptus trees, that kitschy, iconic, and slightly absurd marker consisting of 50-foot-tall letters spread across nearly 500 feet atop Mount Lee has signified Los Angeles and its attendant associations for more than a century. But in some ways, that missing syllable gestures toward an even deeper truth about this region. The word “Hollywoodland” is slightly fantastical, evoking a southern California that’s as mythic as it is actual — a fitting moniker for the forge of American dreams, a place configured to generate spectacle and narrative, the maker of cellulose nitrate chimeras in the form of physical film often as combustible as the illusions it conveyed. A kingdom of imagery for an art form that, if not invented by Americans, was at least stoked to its potential here, at the western terminus of the continent. In 1923, Los Angeles was a dry, desert city of Art Deco skyscrapers and Modernist homes clinging to the hillsides of her craggy neighborhoods, an urban landscape of coyotes and bobcats. Today, the city of Los Angeles is home to nearly four million people, and the county a stunning 10 million. And it’s on fire.

more here.

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Inanna Hamati-Ataya at Aeon Magazine:

During the past three decades, more people have begun viewing our ‘global’ world as a cursed fate. With its suffocating time-space compression, globalisation seems to have uncoupled us from the logic and flow of history. Our suspicious, bastard identities – patched together from a mishmash of cultures – appear incompatible with our ancestors’ ‘authentic’ traditions and ways of life. We have become strangers to the places they called home, to the ways they dressed, ate or communicated with one another. And, with no template for how to live and no experience to learn from, the deafening siren songs of anti-globalisation movements are now luring us back into the safer identities and boundaries of a lost, golden past.

This tale of globalisation is the most successful scare story of our times. And like all scare stories, it stimulates our fear of an overwhelming unknown. But it’s all an illusion. There is no new global world. Our present appears that way only because we have forgotten our common past. Globalisation didn’t begin in the 1990s, or even in the past millennia.

more here.

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Rebecca Solnit in The Guardian:

It was only last month that the Franklin fire, fanned by the dry Santa Ana winds from the east gusting up to 50 miles an hour, burned 4,000 acres around Malibu in 48 hours. The Station fire burned 160,577 acres in 2009 to set the record as LA’s largest and the Woolsey fire in 2018 burned 96,949 acres and destroyed 1,643 structures, while the 1970 Malibu fire destroyed 31,000 acres, incinerated hundreds of structures, and killed 10 people, fed in part by six months of no rain. Los Angeles has a history of catastrophic fire.

As Mike Davis, in his bluntly titled 1998 essay The Case for Letting Malibu Burn, noted: “Malibu, meanwhile, is the wildfire capital of North America and, possibly, the world. Fire here has a relentless staccato rhythm, syncopated by landslides and floods. The rugged 22-mile-long coastline is scourged, on the average, by a large fire (one thousand acres plus) every two and a half years, and the entire surface area of the western Santa Monica Mountains has been burnt three times over the twentieth century.” The case for letting Malibu burn is that it is inevitably going to burn, over and over, but fire departments protect structures as long as they can.

None of these facts make what is happening now less terrible. And it is terrible – to me personally as well; people I know have lost not just their homes but their neighborhoods; friends and family have had to evacuate not knowing if they’ll have homes to return to. But these facts do perhaps make it all less surprising.

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Thomas Curwen in the Los Angeles Times:

“When you study the destruction in Pacific Palisades and Altadena, note what didn’t burn — unconsumed tree canopies adjacent to totally destroyed homes,” he said. “The sequence of destruction is commonly assumed to occur in some kind of organized spreading flame front — a tsunami of super-heated gases — but it doesn’t happen that way.

“In high-density development, scattered burning homes spread to their neighbors and so on. Ignitions downwind and across streets are typically from showers of burning embers from burning structures.”

This fundamental misunderstanding has likewise led to a misunderstanding of prevention. No longer is it a matter of preventing wildfires but instead preventing points of ignition within communities by employing “home-hardening” strategies — proper landscaping, fire-resistant siding — and enjoining neighbors in collective efforts such as brush clearing.

More here.

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Ezra Klein in the New York Times:

Donald Trump is returning, artificial intelligence is maturing, the planet is warming, and the global fertility rate is collapsing.

To look at any of these stories in isolation is to miss what they collectively represent: the unsteady, unpredictable emergence of a different world. Much that we took for granted over the last 50 years — from the climate to birthrates to political institutions — is breaking down; movements and technologies that seek to upend the next 50 years are breaking through.

Let’s begin with American politics. Trump is eight days from taking the oath of office for the second time, and America’s institutional storm walls are not, in 2025, what they were in 2017.

The Republican Party is meek, and Trump knows it. He would not have dared to send Senate Republicans names like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, Kash Patel and Pete Hegseth for cabinet posts in his first term. Even beyond the party, he faces no mass resistance this time, nothing like the Women’s March that overwhelmed Washington in 2017. Democrats are dispirited and exhausted.

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David Phillips at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews:

David Edmonds’ Parfit belongs to a burgeoning genre. There are the two recent collective biographies of Anscombe, Foot, Midgley and Murdoch (by Benjamin Lipscomb and by Claire Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman). There are M.W. Rowe’s J.L. Austin: Philosopher and D-Day Intelligence Officer and Nikhil Krishnan’s A Terribly Serious Adventure. Earlier works include Ray Monk’s Russell and Wittgenstein volumes, Tom Regan’s Bloomsbury’s Prophet, and Bart Schultz’s books on Sidgwick and the other classical utilitarians. And Edmonds himself is inter alia the author of The Murder of Professor Schlick and the coauthor of Wittgenstein’s Poker.

Derek Parfit stands out among the subjects of these various works for being so contemporary. Edmonds could draw on a vast collection of stories conveying Parfit’s legendary eccentricity. But he also took on in a particularly acute form the challenge of writing simultaneously for two quite different audiences. One audience consists of philosophers, some of whom are the sources of the stories and almost all of whom know a good deal about Parfit and his ideas. The other audience consists of general readers who are apt to come to the book knowing little or nothing about either.

I think Edmonds meets this challenge admirably.

more here.

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