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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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 
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.
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 
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Donald Trump is returning, artificial intelligence is maturing, the planet is warming, and the global fertility rate is collapsing.
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.
“No one will know you tomorrow. / The shelling ended / only to start again within you,” writes the poet Najwan Darwish in his new collection. Darwish, who was born in Jerusalem in 1978, is one of the most striking poets working in Arabic today. The intimate, carefully wrought poems in his new book, , No One Will Know You Tomorrow, translated into English by Kareem James Abu-Zeid, were written over the past decade. They depict life under Israeli occupation—periods of claustrophobic sameness, wartime isolation, waiting. “How do we spend our lives in the colony? / Cement blocks and thirsty crows / are the only things I see,” he writes. His verses distill loss into a few terse lines. In a poem titled “A Brief Commentary on ‘Literary Success,’ ” he writes, “These ashes that were once my body, / that were once my country— / are they supposed to find joy / in all of this?” Many poems recall love letters: to Mount Carmel, to the city of Haifa. To a lover who, abandoned, “shares my destiny.” He speaks of “joy’s solitary confinement” because “exile has taken / everyone I love.” Irony and humor are present (“I’ll be late to Hell. / I know Charon will ask for a permit / to board his boat. / Even there / I’ll need a Schengen visa”), but it is Darwish’s ability to convey both tremulous wonder and tragedy that make this collection so distinct.
Interacting with AI chatbots like ChatGPT can be fun and sometimes useful, but the next level of everyday AI goes beyond answering questions: AI agents carry out tasks for you.
When Dr. Nir Barzilai met the 100-year-old Helen Reichert, she was smoking a cigarette. Dr. Barzilai, the director of the Institute for Aging Research at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, recalled Mrs. Reichert saying that doctors had repeatedly told her to quit. But those doctors had all died, Mrs. Reichert noted, and she hadn’t. Mrs. Reichert lived almost another decade before passing away in 2011.