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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.

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Alexia Underwood at the Paris Review:

“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.

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Brian O’Neil in Singularity Hub:

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.

Major technology companies, including OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, and Salesforce, have recently released or announced plans to develop and release AI agents. They claim these innovations will bring newfound efficiency to technical and administrative processes underlying systems used in health care, robotics, gaming, and other businesses. Simple AI agents can be taught to reply to standard questions sent over email. More advanced ones can book airline and hotel tickets for transcontinental business trips. Google recently demonstrated Project Mariner to reporters, a browser extension for Chrome that can reason about the text and images on your screen.

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Dana Smith in The New York Times:

Gary Younge in The Ideas Letter:

In the film American Fiction, the culturally refined Dr Theolonius “Monk” Ellison, an African American author and professor, is struggling to get his highbrow novels published: the white gatekeepers to the literary world believe they are not “Black enough” and would rather put out ghetto stereotypes. So he writes a spoof novel, set in the hood, under the pseudonym Stagg R. Leigh. He calls it FUCK and pretends to be an author whose identity needs to be protected because he’s on the run from the police. It’s snapped up for a huge sum, giving Monk’s ghettofabulous doppelganger more money and attention than his culturally elevated original ever enjoyed. Later he is asked to join a judging panel for a book award, which has been accused of being too white. “I’m honored you’d choose me out of all the black writers you could go to for fear of being called racist,” says Monk facetiously.

FUCK is shortlisted for the award. The three white judges praise it as “gutsy”, “necessary” and “like gazing into an open wound”. When Monk and the only other Black judge argue that the book should not win the prize they are overruled by the three white judges, the most aggressively liberal of whom states: “I just think it’s essential to listen to black voices right now.” As the Black author of six books, much of the scene rang true to me. Indeed, the film wouldn’t work as a parody if it didn’t bear some resemblance to reality.

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Lily Hu in Boston Review:

A new common sense has emerged regarding the perils of predictive algorithms. As the groundbreaking work of scholars like Safiya Noble, Cathy O’Neil, Virginia Eubanks, and Ruha Benjamin has shown, big data tools—from crime predictors in policing to risk predictors in finance—increasingly govern our lives in ways unaccountable and often unknown to the public. They replicate bias, entrench inequalities, and distort institutional aims. They devalue much of what makes us human: our capacities to exercise discretion, act spontaneously, and reason in ways that can’t be quantified. And far from being objective or neutral, technical decisions made in system design embed the values, aims, and interests of mostly white, mostly male technologists working in mostly profit-driven enterprises. Simply put, these tools are dangerous; in O’Neil’s words, they are “weapons of math destruction.”

These arguments offer an essential corrective to the algorithmic solutionism peddled by Big Tech—the breathless enthusiasm that promises, in the words of Silicon Valley venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, to “make everything we care about better.” But they have also helped to reinforce a profound skepticism of this technology as such. Are the political implications of algorithmic tools really so different from those of our decision-making systems of yore? If human systems already entrench inequality, replicate bias, and lack democratic legitimacy, might data-based algorithms offer some promise in addition to peril? If so, how should we approach the collective challenge of building better institutions, both human and machine?

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Adam Tooze over at his substack, Chartbook:

2008 and the years that followed delivered a historic shock.

The vertiginous panic of the financial crisis, the protracted eurozone crisis that followed, the Occupy movement and the “inequality moment”, BLM, mounting anxiety about fascistoid politics, the radicalization of the climate crisis, escalating geopolitical tension, all this and more has led to a search for big, urgent, powerful frames of analysis. Anything less seems inadequate to the moment.

One of the responses on the progressive political side has been a return to what you might call classical foundations. For some this was Marxism. For others, myself included, it involved a return to Keynes, left Keynesianism and currents like MMT and the Green New Deal.

This turn was “necessary”. It has been intellectually and politically productive. But it also came at a price.

What I worry about is a double evasion of history, both “real” and intellectual, if such a distinction may be permitted:

a. In real terms: by anchoring critique in classical social theories that were shaped above all by the 1900-1950 moment, we risk underestimating the radicalism of the present. This is not to underestimate the dramas of the early 20th century – I hope I may be spared that accusation. But to insist on the novelty, unprecedented scale and pace of our current predicament.

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Dr. Sunita Sah in Time Magazine:

From an early age, we are taught that obedience is good, and disobedience is bad. Saying yes is polite and agreeable, while saying no is often seen as selfish or disruptive. These lessons shape us psychologically, socially, and even neurologically. When we are rewarded for compliant behavior, our brain rewards us with a hit of dopamine, the neurotransmitter associated with pleasure. Repeated compliance strengthens the neural pathways associated with saying “yes.”

On the other hand, acts of defiance—especially when they are met with disapproval—receive no such reward, making those pathways weaker or less likely to develop. Over time, compliance becomes a default response. This tendency is reinforced throughout our lives. At school, we are praised for obedience and penalized for questioning authority. At work, compliance is embedded in professional hierarchies. Even in our personal lives, studies show that those who are conscientious or have agreeable dispositions are more likely to acquiesce to others’ demands. It’s no wonder, then, that saying “yes” feels easier, safer, and even expected—while saying no can feel like swimming against a tide of social conditioning.

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What is Offered

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Sara Mitchell at Literary Hub:

Crumple zones are a standard safety feature in modern vehicles. Upon impact, your car is designed to crush, mangle, and deform itself in a controlled manner. It absorbs the energy of the crash upon itself, rather than transferring the energy into what’s referred to as “the safety cell,” aka you. Béla Barényi, dubbed by Mercedes Benz as “the lifesaver,” engineered the first crumple zones on an automobile. Mercedes said at the time, “Manufacturers carefully avoided using the term [safety]…nobody wanted to be reminded about the dangers of driving. The topic was viewed as a sales killer.”

But Barényi was ahead of his time when he recognized that the kinetic energy of a crash could be dissipated by the controlled deformation of the vehicle. That it would buy the two most important things needed: time and space between you and your crash. It buys fractions of a second as the hood crumples, before the most dangerous part, when the car stops and your head flies forward and back again. If you’re lucky, you’ll sprain your neck, but if you’re not, you’ll break it, or suffer what’s called a basilar fracture, a break at the base of the skull.

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Chris Simms in New Scientist:

Sabre teeth have very specific characteristics: they are exceptionally long, sharp canines that tend to be slightly flattened and curved, rather than rounded. Such teeth have independently evolved in different groups of mammals at least five times, and fossils of sabre-tooth predators have been found in North and South America, Europe and Asia.

The teeth are first known to have appeared some 270 million years ago, in mammal-like reptiles called gorgonopsids. Another example is Thylacosmilus, which died out about 2.5 million years ago and was most closely related to marsupials. Sabre teeth were last seen in Smilodon, often called sabre-toothed tigers, which existed until about 10,000 years ago.

To investigate why these teeth kept re-evolving, Tahlia Pollock at the University of Bristol, UK, and her colleagues looked at the canines of 95 carnivorous mammal species, including 25 sabre-toothed ones.

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Wolfgang Streeck at the European Journal of Social Theory:

Accessing and explicating the complexities of the collective subconscious that underlies a culture requires a hermeneutic skill and a richness of concepts and examples that is not at my disposal. I have nothing to add to Heidrun Friese’s insightful psycho-analysis of the Tätervolk that wants to draw a Schlussstrich by insisting that it doesn’t want to draw a Schlussstrich, offering reparation, Wiedergutmachung, for what cannot be repaired, hoping to be forgiven the unforgivable by declaring it unforgivable. I will instead focus on a simpler subject, one that lends itself, I hope, to be treated with the less sophisticated toolkit of the political scientist: not the depths of culture but the heights of politics, of government, of state, in particular the contingencies and constraints faced by a German state which had chosen to be the successor state of the Drittes Reich, in its dual relationship with its international context and its domestic society.

When the Federal Republic was founded by the three Western Allies in 1949, its first Chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, had to govern with what the unconditional surrender had left of the Nazi killing machine. There was hardly anybody else, on both the conservative and the social-democratic side, who knew how to run a ministry, a secret service, a police corps, a court of justice, or injustice as the case might have been.

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