Miles Kellerman at Aeon:

The global financial system is a colossal factory containing an endless web of information assembly lines. Every time you tap your card on a payment terminal, whether it’s for a coffee on the way to work or a new vacuum cleaner, you are sending a new informational signal to that factory. Like raw material, that signal is then loaded on a conveyor belt where it is checked and modified by your bank, the seller’s bank, a payment processor, card network, and other intermediaries as it proceeds. The assembly line may be relatively short for cups of coffee. For more complicated purchases, however, like mortgages and stocks, the transactional chain can become remarkably complex.

But not all transactions take place in this factory. There are, in fact, entirely separate payment networks that operate outside the confines of state-regulated information assembly lines. The Chinese refer to them as feiqian (‘flying money’). Arabic speakers prefer the term hawala, whereas the Indian diaspora operates through a practice called hundi. In English, we have developed an ominous phrase to capture these various informal networks: underground banking.

Such a phrase may evoke images of drug dealers, money launderers and corrupted officials. And, indeed, states have long been concerned about the potential utilisation of these networks for crime and terrorist financing. But numerous scholars have pushed back against this securitised narrative.

More here.

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Maria Popova at The Marginalian:

One of the 35 girls among the 2,000 students at Mexico’s National Preparatory School, Frida Kahlo (July 6, 1907–July 13, 1954) was fifteen when she met Alejandro Gómez Arias. Both were passionate and erudite, both were members of the anarchist student group known as Los Cachuchas for the pointed cloth caps they wore in defiance of the era’s restrictive dress code, both became each other’s first love. Alejandro was on the bus with Frida that fateful late-summer day shortly after her eighteenth birthday when a tram collision killed several other passengers and left her so severely injured — her pelvis fractured, her stomach and uterus punctured by a rail, her spine broken in three places and her leg in eleven — that the doctors at the Red Cross Hospital did not think she could be saved. It was Alejandro’s unrelenting insistence that made them try. Against all odds, Frida lived — but her life was irrevocably changed. How she coped with what she had to live through in turn changed the history of art.

Her letters to Alejandro, collected in the altogether stirring volume Frida Kahlo: Love Letters (public library) edited by Suzanne Barbezat, offer a rare glimpse of her becoming — as an artist, as a lover, as a person who lived with extraordinary vulnerability, extraordinary courage, and the precocious awareness that the conversation between the two is the measure of a life.

more here.

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Quing Zhu in The Conversation:

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Andrew Macintosh in Nature:

It is a dark time for climate policy and global affairs. Wars in Ukraine, the Gaza Strip and now Iran, as well as the domestic and international policy and trade agendas of US President Donald Trump’s administration, are diverting attention from efforts to cut greenhouse-gas emissions. Momentum for mitigating climate change is now in retreat, as it was after the 2008 global financial crisis. Economist Nicholas Stern pushes against that tide in his latest book. The Growth Story of the 21st Century is drawn from lectures at the London School of Economics in 2024 and builds on his earlier works in an attempt to reinvigorate worldwide efforts to limit global warming.

Stern’s 2006 report for the UK government, The Economics of Climate Change, is arguably the most influential work on that topic, both because of its content and the fierce debate that it prompted. The report, and his 2016 book Why Are We Waiting?, pushed the case for immediate and aggressive efforts to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, based mostly on the argument that it is cheaper to decarbonize than it is to deal with the potentially catastrophic costs of climate change.

More here.

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Rachel Ossip at n+1:

In 1967, in the heart of Manhattan’s theater district, my grandfather Jerry opened a steakhouse. The Cattle Baron took the energy of a theme restaurant and gave it an adult polish. Red and white tablecloths, quilted wall panels, dark wood accents, and uplight chandeliers accented the red brick walls, while waitstaff appeared in “Western attire.” The following year, advertisements in Playbill and the New York Post implored eaters to “Break the Dull Steak House Habit” by patronizing Jerry Ossip’s Cattle Baron. “We looked around at the steak house scene. And we found it dreary,” the ad proclaimed. “We opened up the Cattle Baron for you men (and your women) who hunger for the best steak in town—and something else, besides.”

The real draw sat just above these words: a black-and-white image of a woman kneeling naked in a Stetson, glancing seductively over her shoulder. Her body is portioned out with painted lines, each segment labeled as a cut: chuck, rib, loin, rump, soup bone, and so on.

more here.

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Wolfgang Streeck in Sidecar:

The Israeli-American war against Iran has thrown financial markets into turmoil and there is growing concern across national economies. Does this remind you of the oil price shock of the 1970s?

Not very much. Back then, it was all still relatively manageable: not much more than a producers’ cartel in the Middle East. Today, thanks to fracking the United States is energy self-sufficient and can afford any kind of madness, including the systematic destruction of energy infrastructure not only in Iran but across the Gulf states – and, as a bonus, the destruction of Iranian society. By contrast, in the 1970s Nixon and Kissinger were preparing for rapprochement with China, while in Germany the Brandt government was turning to a policy of détente, which contributed to the dissolution of the Eastern Bloc two decades later.

Could the war against Iran turn out to be the biggest mistake of Trump’s presidency? He evidently underestimated the potential for escalation.

The Americans always do – they don’t need Trump for that. Look at Biden in Ukraine, and in his wake the Europeans who allowed themselves to be convinced that the war would be over in a few months (the Russians, incidentally, believed something similar). The EU has now taken over the Ukraine war and insists that it must continue, even though the Americans have lost interest and the Russians have, by and large, already won. Why? Presumably because they do not want to admit that they ‘underestimated the potential for escalation’ as you put it. But it could also be that they anticipate technological and economic benefits, as well as greater internal cohesion, from a war others are fighting for them.

More here.

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Sarah Miller-Davenport in The Ideas Letter:

The most facile assessments of Zohran Mamdani’s extraordinary campaign to lead New York City attribute its success to his innovative use of social media and a communication style that appealed to voters with TikTok accounts. But often lost in the narrative of his historic win—inevitably reduced to his age and the novelty of a democratic socialist mayor—is the long tradition of progressive urban policy that his platform evoked. Mamdani’s agenda seeks to disinter, if not fully revive, New Deal–era New York. In doing so, it promises to finally shake the albatross of the city’s 1975 fiscal crisis.

As the general campaign intensified, Mamdani’s team launched a series of videos under the banner “Until It’s Done,” a phrase borrowed from Nelson Mandela. Each began with the solemn-faced candidate striding into frame and sitting behind an antique wooden desk placed in the middle of a sidewalk or public park. For those closely attuned to the semiotics of the Mamdani campaign’s near-constant video drops, you knew you were in for a history lesson. In the final entry in the series, Mamdani celebrated the political career of Vito Marcantonio, the seven-term socialist congressman from East Harlem and a mentee of Fiorello La Guardia, a mayor who had championed labor and civil rights. Posted on the eve of Election Day, the video urged voters, “we need look only to our past for proof of how socialism can shape our future.”

More here.

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Lindsay Beyerstein in Dissent:

Jeffrey Epstein checks every conspiracist box. The late sex trafficker was a Jewish financier linked to the Rothschilds, the Rockefellers, the Trilateral Commission, and the Council on Foreign Relations. His influence extended to the House of Saud, the House of Windsor, the Russian Federation, and Israel. He liked pizza. Renewed attention to the astonishing number of prominent men cultivated by Epstein has poured fuel on simmering conspiracy theories of shadowy child trafficking rings run by powerful elites. As Ana Marie Cox observed in the New Republic, “every new file drop brings at least a whisper of validation to QAnon’s core contentions.” Even some serious-minded observers are willing to entertain increasingly outlandish claims. Tara Palmeri, one of the most prominent journalists on the Epstein beat, even suggested that Epstein might have been growing mind-control plants in his garden to turn his victims into zombies.

As a result, in February former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton found herself fielding questions about Pizzagate and UFOs when she testified before Congress about her nonexistent relationship with Epstein. Beginning in the 2016 presidential election, peddlers of the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, which laid the groundwork for QAnon, held that Clinton and other high-ranking Democrats were trafficking children from the basement of a beloved family restaurant in Washington, D.C. that has no basement.

More here.

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Blake Morrison in The Guardian:

Every day I meet strangers who share intimate details with me. It’s called reading. In a newspaper piece a former sex addict recalls her need for BDSM (“when a sexual partner hurt me, I felt seen”) and how she conquered her dependency. On Substack an actor describes her grief on losing a baby (“After the miscarriage, I became convinced my daughter was backstage. I would push back the costumes on the rack and almost expect to find her”). And then there are the published memoirs, first-person stories of trauma, displacement and heartbreak. It’s not just women who unburden themselves, of course. As Martin Amis says in his memoir, Experience: “We are all writing it or at any rate talking it: the memoir, the apologia, the CV, the cri de coeur.”

Recent memoirs have upped the ante, though. What was once a geriatric, self-satisfied genre (politicians, generals and film stars looking back fondly on long careers) is now open to anyone with a story to tell – “nobody memoirs”, the American journalist Lorraine Adams has called them. Candour is the key, no matter how fraught the consequences.

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Jim Windolf in The New York Times:

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Wait a Minute

I open my eyes in the morning.
For a minute
I am neither here nor there.
Then in the next minute
I am here but starting
to be there.

The day has begun.

I will get up
and start to seek,
and continue starting,
so that every minute of this day
will begin with an anticipation
of the promise of the next one.
All day long and into the evening,
every minute of my waking hours,
I will not be here
because I am seeking
to be there.

I tell myself —
a pill will do it,
a walk in the fine fresh air will do it,
a Villa-Lobos prelude will do it,
a message on my telephone answering machine will do it,
a good library book will do it,
a glass of wine at five o’clock will do it,
a good dinner will do it.

I close my eyes in the evening,
and I say to myself,
with relief at the day’s ending:
a good night’s sleep will do it.

Every day is the same.
I never stop to ask:
“Do what?”
I never think to look for
what it is
that lies between the
beginning of the minute
and the end of it.

by Peggy Freydberg
from Poems from the Pond
107 Years of Words and Wisdom
    —Hybrid Nation, 2015

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From the European Review of Books:

Belal felt life had become « too fast, stripped of slowness and reflection, and constrained by the lack of freedom to live and experience fully. » Visiting his hometown, Tartus, he opened a drawer of old family photographs. Some he rephotographed, wondering if he could bring the archive back to life: « an act of resistance against forgetting, speed, and the indifference imposed by years of war. »

More here.

Steven Pinker at Quillette:

In March 2026, three prominent thinkers died within a day of each other. Lavish obituaries immediately marked the deaths of the always-wrong environmentalist Paul Ehrlich and the often-obscure political philosopher Jürgen Habermas. But two weeks after the death of Robert Trivers, one of the greatest evolutionary biologists since Charles Darwin, not a single major news source has noticed his passing. This despite Trivers’s singular accomplishment of showing how the endlessly fascinating complexities of human relations are grounded in the wellsprings of complex life. And despite the fact that the man’s life was itself an object of fascination. Trivers was no ordinary academic. He was privileged in upbringing but louche in lifestyle, personally endearing but at times obstreperous and irresponsible, otherworldly brilliant but forehead-slappingly foolish.

Trivers’s contributions belong in the special category of ideas that are obvious once they are explained, yet eluded great minds for ages; simple enough to be stated in a few words, yet with implications that have busied scientists for decades. In an astonishing creative burst from 1971 to 1975, Trivers wrote five seminal essays that invoked patterns of genetic overlap to explain each of the major human relationships: male with female, parent with child, sibling with sibling, partner with partner, and a person with himself or herself.

The fallout for science was vast. The fields of sociobiology, evolutionary psychology, behavioural ecology, and Darwinian social science are largely projects that test Trivers’s hypotheses.

More here.

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Stephen Sims in The New Atlantis:

The drones had been trained using AI to recognize Tu-95 “Bear” bombers based on photographs taken of a decommissioned version in a Ukrainian air museum and to recognize the weakest point of the bombers, often the fuel tanks in the wings. This allowed the drones, flying first autonomously and then with human pilots, to strike Russian bombers with high precision as far away as Siberia.

In the grand scheme of geopolitics, these events were small. The conflict between Iran and Israel ended up being more like glorified shadowboxing than real war, and the Ukrainian strike on Russia did nothing to change the relentless, grinding attrition of the front line. These events are not obvious ruptures in international politics, as when nuclear fire consumed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. That moment announced with dreadful clarity that the future of war and strategy would never be the same. The use of AI coupled with drones, however, is more like Sputnik in 1957, a seemingly small event that nevertheless drastically altered the human relationship to technology.

More here.

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