John Last at Noema:

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the possible death and dismemberment of my country. Time and again, I scan the news and hear rumblings of war. Threats of annexation and domination. Glib guides on the political benefits of erasing my country from the map. Grim military models projecting our army’s easy defeat in hypothetical invasion scenarios and our society’s collapse into a patchwork of mujahedeen-style militias.

I do not live in Iran, or Cuba, or Venezuela. I live in Canada. And until very recently, such headlines would have been the work of perverse fantasists. Canada has long been a veritable Eden of middle-class gentility. But something grave has shifted in the world order. Under the National Security Strategy (NSS) of the Trump administration, the line between allied and enemy nations has blurred to the point of non-existence.

Today, the U.S. and its antagonists can strike virtually anywhere at any time, making geography less and less relevant to conflict. Over the past half-century or so, the goals of war have also changed.

More here.

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Karl Ove Knausgaard at the Paris Review:

The Sick Child by Edvard Munch is undoubtedly a highlight of Norwegian painting, still compelling and touching, still unsurpassed. The odd thing is that the painting seemingly came out of nothing: Munch was twenty-one years old when he painted it, he had hardly any education, hardly any experience as a painter, and he painted it on the very outskirts of provincial Europe, in a Kristiania where, only a few decades before, cows could be seen ambling through the streets. Equally odd is the fact that this painting, which marks the beginning of Munch’s artistic career, his first masterpiece, is also an end point: he never again made anything that came close to it. The Sick Child is an anomaly—it resembles nothing else from that period, and nothing else in Munch’s long life as an artist. He worked on it for a year, adding layer upon layer, then, scraping the paint off, added new layers, scraped them off, as if he were burrowing into something, or toward something. When he exhibited it at the Annual Autumn Exhibition in Kristiania in 1886 he still considered it unfinished, and titled it Study. At the exhibition the painting was ridiculed, people laughed and pointed at it, the newspapers slammed it. Nowadays this is difficult to understand. How could anyone ridicule something so palpably heartfelt and vulnerable, and so existentially threatening, for isn’t it the very image of deep emotion and existential threat? 

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A J Lees at Literary Review:

When I became a doctor in the late 1960s, patients admitted with a stroke were nursed out of sight in quiet side cubicles, removed from the bustle of the open wards. On bedside visits we encouraged them to move their lifeless limbs, to speak and to work hard with the therapists. When they despaired, we offered hope, telling them that improvement could continue for up to a year. Those unable to go home were transferred after several weeks to ‘warehouses’, often at the far end of daunting corridors in district general hospitals. There they languished, drinking Guinness and smoking cigarettes. The priest was a more frequent visitor than the physiotherapist. These victims of misfortune had been all but abandoned by the medical profession and sometimes by their families too. The Royal Hospital for the Incurables in Putney and the National Spinal Injuries Centre at Stoke Mandeville were lone beacons of enlightenment in the south of England. In the great London teaching hospitals, the handful of physicians who took an interest in the rehabilitation of the acutely brain-injured were disparaged by the brotherhood (neurologists at that time were all men) as second-rate diagnosticians or well-meaning cranks.

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From Time Magazine:

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Sneha Khedkar in The Scientist:

In 2019, just before the COVID-19 pandemic struck, oncology researcher Barry Hudson moved his laboratory from the University of Miami to Georgetown University. Many universities dialed down research activities due to the pandemic, causing a slight delay in setting up the new lab. “What that led to was, we ended up with…a lot of mice,” said Hudson. By the time the team restarted their work, the majority of the mice were more than one year old, reaching old age. Hudson recognized a unique opportunity to study cancer in these older animals, which is particularly relevant since older people experience worse outcomes in some cancers, including breast cancer.¹

Despite this fact, most breast cancer researchers use two- to three-month-old mice for their work, which are equivalent in age to 15-20-year-old humans.² “People didn’t really know what happened to cancers in older mice,” said Hudson. Now, by using aged mice, Hudson and his team discovered that aging significantly increased breast cancer metastasis via a cell surface receptor that contributes to inflammation.³ Their findings, published in Communications Biology, highlight how aging alters the host environment to boost cancer aggression and offer potential therapeutic targets to contain metastasis in older patients with cancer.

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Elisa Gabbert at the New York Times:

To write about art might encourage some removal from the self, but nothing requires it. And so this accident of history has caused me to associate I-lessness with ekphrasis: a mode that elides the I as if some universal eye were speaking out. The invisible, anonymous describer of museum placards.

By contrast, in what I’ll go ahead and call the new ekphrasis (though we know nothing’s new in the multiverse), the I is highly present. Description, in this strain of recent poetry, is deeply inflected by a singular viewpoint. The poems could not be more intensely felt than those by Keats or Rilke, yet they have different effects — more embodied and more personal, even confessional.

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From Anthropic:

For most of AI’s history, humans drove every step in its development cycle. But at Anthropic, we are delegating a growing share of AI development to AI systems themselves, which is speeding up our work.

Taken far enough, and given enough compute, that trend points to an AI system capable of fully autonomously designing and developing its own successor. This is called recursive self-improvement. We are not there yet, and recursive self-improvement is not inevitable. But it could come sooner than most institutions are prepared for.

Using public benchmarks and previously unreported data from within Anthropic, The Anthropic Institute is showing that AI is already accelerating the development of AI systems. To take just one example: today, Anthropic engineers on average ship 8x as much code per quarter as they did from 2021-2025.

The technical trends discussed in this piece suggest that AI systems are going to become much more capable in coming years. These trends have huge implications. AI that can build itself would be a major development in the history of technology—one that could bring enormous good for the world in science, healthcare, and beyond. But full recursive self-improvement also might increase the risks of humans losing control over AI systems.

More here.

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Matt Lutz at Humean Report:

A few hours ago, something of a bomb got dropped on the humanities. A new report was commissioned by the Chancellors of Vanderbilt University and Washington University last year, with the goal of assessing the merit of various accusations that have been leveled at the academic humanities in recent years. The mission:

Several scientists have alleged over the years that there is widespread misunderstanding and misuse of natural science in the work of prominent humanists. Philosophers have worried about the unquestioning embrace of problematic philosophical views, especially those concerning truth, evidence and knowledge. More recently, many different voices have suggested that humanistic disciplines have allowed background ideological values to distort the objective pursuit of knowledge in those fields.

To help us assess whether, and to what extent, there is a problem here, we charge a commission of eminent scholars from these disciplines to examine the state of scholarly work in their respective areas and to evaluate whether these allegations are justified.

And a commission of eminent scholars was, indeed, empaneled. 10 scholars from different areas of the humanities are listed as authors of the report, 4 of which are philosophers. And those four – Paul Boghossian, Kit Fine, Kwame Anthony Appiah, and Gideon Rosen – are among the most senior, respected philosophers working today. A murderer’s row, if you will.

More here.

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Charlotte Köckert at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews:

Benjamin Gleede situates Gregory’s concept of simultaneous creation within the Christian tradition and discusses how Gregory goes beyond his predecessors: unlike Philo of Alexandria and Origen, Gregory develops an “evolutionary conception of the creation sequence” (103) by combining the concept of simultaneous creation with the idea of “progressive creation”. In doing so, he not only explains that the process of creation’s unfolding follows an inner order, but he also identifies the immanent intelligible powers (Logoi) that God embedded in creation at the moment of the world’s beginning and which henceforth govern this order. Gleede argues that for Gregory, the idea of “progressive creation” is necessary due to the fundamental difference between Creator and creature, between eternity and time: his “bundle-conception” of matter presupposes the successive emergence of form in matter; the world as an essentially temporal being cannot have a timeless, simultaneous origin for all its parts. Unlike his predecessors, Gregory integrates into his cosmological model the Christian conception of time as a limited teleological process that actually attains its God-given goal and whose beginning and end are set by God. This understanding of time differs fundamentally from that of the Platonists, who conceive of time as an eternal striving toward eternity that, despite all its teleological orientation, always falls short of its ideal.

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Dorian Brady at Aeon Magazine:

Mozart sets this text to music of almost unbearable tenderness. The aria is graceful and resigned, and the whole scene is among the most beautiful in the opera. Nowhere up to this point has Fiordiligi sounded so sincere, so defeated, so richly deserving of our sympathy and compassion.

But beneath the music’s ravishing surface runs an undercurrent of cruel irony. Woven into the orchestral accompaniment are two solo horns that intrude on Fiordiligi’s melody when it repeats, punctuating her line with ornate interjections. Audiences in the 18th century would have recognised these horn calls as musical symbols of cuckoldry, a widely understood pun on the image of the ‘horned husband’ who suffers sexual betrayal by his inconstant wife. The horns’ presence here shatters Fiordiligi’s most heartfelt declaration of shame.

more here.

Timotheus Vermeulen in iai:

Sometime between 1914 and 1915, the German philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin wrote an essay on two poems by the Romantic poet and misunderstood visionary Friedrich Hölderlin. It is a peculiar and little-known piece of writing. By the author’s own account, it should be a straightforward exercise in close reading. But by the time he draws his conclusions he has offered all of a circuitous metaphysics of poetry, an implicit contemplation of the nature of time, and an elegy for his childhood friend Fritz Heinle, a would-be poet who had killed himself earlier that year. It’s also unmistakably the work of a young writer still finding his voice: grandiose, purple, convoluted, banal, exciting, inconclusive, all impulse and little orientation.

Benjamin is celebrated today as one of the great stylists among theorists (especially compared to some of the others associated with the Frankfurt School), a master of prose as well as ideas. But this text, ironically, is as tortuous a read as Hölderlin’s notoriously intricate and impenetrable poems of which it tries to make sense.

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From Nature:

Researchers say they have used a precise genome-editing technique called base editing to alter the genome of human embryos for the first time. The announcement has prompted excitement and caution among scientists and bioethicists. Many say the work is an impressive step towards scientists being able to fix disease-causing mutations in embryos. But others worry the technology could be deployed to try to create embryos with traits such as superior intelligence.

Dieter Egli, a developmental cell biologist at Columbia University in New York City and his colleagues posted their results on the bioRxiv preprint site on 1 June¹. The study, which was first reported by The New York Times, has not yet been peer reviewed.

More here.

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Herman Mark Schwartz in Phenomenal World:

Herman Mark Schwartz: We tend to think of empires as a set of power relations that can be physically described on a map, coloring in the territorial reach of the Roman or the British Empire. This assumes that the empire depicted has some sort of clear beginning and end—everything not colored in is therefore not part of the empire. I think that is a fundamentally wrong understanding of how empires work. There is a gradient of declining cooperation and rising coercion moving out from the center.

The history of human civilization is in large part a history of empires: large-scale societies mobilizing enormous volumes of resources and exerting control over other human beings, whether by directing labor or regulating behavior in accordance with imperial objectives. At the root of this is the connection between violence and trade—between states and markets. All empires arise through control of long-distance trade.

States seeking to tax their populations often found that the most efficient and profitable strategy was to control long-distance trade and the circulation of luxury goods. Their scarcity made such goods valuable sources of revenue and, critically, these resources were extracted from the elites. Universally consumed commodities—most notably salt—became extraordinarily profitable once brought under centralized control. (This is why we saw salt monopolies in large-scale durable empires like those in China.) But the principal threat to central authority in large empires came from internal elites, and one of the most effective ways to extract resources from them—as they often resisted taxation—was through luxury goods. That’s what the tribute system was about: by controlling external trade, the state secured access to scarce goods and used their distribution to extract wealth via taxation, thereby maintaining leverage over potential internal rivals.

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Over at The Brooklyn Institute:

The artist and writer Molly Crabapple joins journalist Spencer Ackerman and BISR’s Suzy Schneider in coversation about her new book, Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund, which recreates the revolutionary world of the Bundists, and explores the interwoven histories of the Bund, the Russian Revolution, and the Holocaust. What can we learn, she asks, from this short-lived but influential socialist alternative to Zionism? What does this movement have to say about the past and future of the Jewish left, radical diasporas, the politics of assimilation, and the Bund’s cultural and intellectual legacy. What can the transnational history of the Bund teach us about working-class organization, education, and culture? How can the Bund’s radical vision of solidarity inform liberation struggles in the present?

The podcast can be found here.

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Ho-fung Hung in Sidecar:

Every time the global economy plunges into turmoil, talk of the coming end of dollar hegemony resurfaces. In March 1978 – in the wake of the collapse of the Bretton Woods system and amid stagflation in the United States – the New York Times published an op-ed by Soviet economist Stanislav M. Menshikov, ‘A Marxist Look at the Dollar Crisis’. Accompanied by a cartoon of a bear in Red Army uniform examining a dollar bill with a magnifying glass, the article proclaimed that the contradictions and crises of US monopoly capitalism were bringing the dollar’s global dominance to an end, and that major economies had begun to move towards gold and more secure currencies as stores of value.

The 2008 financial crisis, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Trump’s tariffs and threats to invade US allies, and the ongoing war with Iran have all inspired similar predictions that the world’s patience with the postwar monetary order is running out. It seems logical that no major players in the world economy would want to remain dependent on the currency of an erratic power for its trade and savings. The US dollar’s status as a fiat currency – it has not been backed by any precious metal since Nixon ended the dollar’s gold convertibility in 1971 – has long been viewed as fragile, given the United States’s deteriorating current-account and fiscal deficits. Yet the dollar remains the most widely used currency in global trade and finance, with the euro a distant second. Although China has become the second-largest economy and ‘workshop of the world’, international use of the Renminbi remains tiny by comparison, trailing far behind even the British pound and Japanese yen – disappointing those who argue that the RMB is on the verge of becoming the next hegemonic currency.

More here.

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Of the Dark Doves

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