Kevin T Baker in The Guardian:

On the first morning of Operation Epic Fury, 28 February 2026, American forces struck the Shajareh Tayyebeh primary school in Minab, in southern Iran, hitting the building at least two times during the morning session. American forces killed between 175 and 180 people, most of them girls between the ages of seven and 12.

Within days, the question that organised the coverage was whether Claude, a chatbot made by Anthropic, had selected the school as a target. Congress wrote to the US secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, about the extent of AI use in the strikes. The New Yorker magazine asked whether Claude could be trusted to obey orders in combat, whether it might resort to blackmail as a self-preservation strategy, and whether the Pentagon’s chief concern should be that the chatbot had a personality. Almost none of this had any relationship to reality. The targeting for Operation Epic Fury ran on a system called Maven. Nobody was arguing about Maven.

Eight years ago, Maven was the most contested project in Silicon Valley. In 2018, more than 4,000 Google employees signed a letter opposing the company’s contract to build artificial intelligence for the Pentagon’s targeting systems. Workers organised a walk out. Engineers quit. And Google ultimately abandoned the contract. Palantir Technologies, a data analytics company and defence contractor co-founded by Peter Thiel, took it over…

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Andy Hall at Free Systems:

Right now is a weird time to be a political economist. AI is straining our already brittle political institutions. We might lurch into a dystopia in which we live in the grips of a techno-leviathan, forced by our employers to train our own AI replacements, then kicked to the curb in a society organized to the benefit of a tiny number of people who control the machinery that controls the world.

It’s also an electric time to be a political economist. With each new paper my lab puts out, and with each new experimental prototype in self governance we build using tools we couldn’t imagine having even a year ago, I’m starting to believe that AI presents an extraordinary opportunity to rebuild our society so we can keep slouching down the narrow corridor towards utopia.

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David Schurman Wallace at The Nation:

No one understands Gertrude Stein. For this, we should all give thanks. It is almost a cliché to emphasize her work’s difficulty, but her writing remains imposing, both due to its sheer volume—her unpublished writings were originally collected in eight volumes, to say nothing of the numerous books published during her life—and its style.

The style, of course, is what made her both famed and ridiculed, striking out from conventional narrative and often even the conventional meanings of words. If you ever find yourself absorbed in Stein, there is almost a natural desire to imitate her rhythms. Nobody ever entirely nails her peculiarities, though: the flat, dry vocabulary, the off-kilter blend of abstraction and table talk, and perhaps most of all the repetition—sentences that extend themselves and double back and fill up space with their insistence. As Francesca Wade quotes Stein in her new biography, Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife, “Repeating is the whole of living, and by repeating comes understanding, and understanding is to some the most important part of living.” Maybe the reverse maxim here is that we can never repeat enough, so we can never really understand.

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Mark Krotov at n+1:

Dry Leaf is concerned above all with the materiality of the camera—what it captures as it meanders off, and what it fails to detect. To paraphrase the title of Koberidze’s previous feature, what do we see when we look at (or through) the Sony Ericsson?

We see graininess, fuzziness, pixelation. We see shapes over details, colors over textures. In the absence of immediately legible images, details and textures don’t disappear, however—as Dry Leaf’s unclarity clarifies, they proliferate. A car driving down a road becomes a source of visual drama not because we wonder if it’ll have trouble traveling from one side of the frame to the other, but because its wheels may suddenly start to resemble spinning plates. A shot of a pond doesn’t need a swimmer or a fish to generate excitement—what’s thrilling is the moment when the image congeals and the pond acquires a thick, black border, a failure to process contrast that nevertheless reads as a real-life Cezanne landscape taking shape before our eyes. A white curtain in the breeze twitches when it should be billowing, and a newspaper being blown around a soccer stadium looks somehow heavier than it really is, flopping around the stands with an odd decisiveness.

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Ellen Wexler in Smithsonian:

As John Adams lobbied in Philadelphia for American independence, his wife, Abigail, was consumed with questions. She filled pages with them, often complaining when John didn’t answer fully or quickly enough. “What code of laws will be established?” she wrote to him from their home in Braintree, Massachusetts, in November 1775. “Who shall frame these laws? Who will give them force and energy?” Five months later, as members of the Second Continental Congress dragged their feet on separation from Britain, she wondered, “Shall we not be despised by foreign powers for hesitating so long?”

In her letters, Abigail kept her husband abreast of the siege of Boston, vividly describing “the rattling of the windows, the jar of the house and the continual roar of 24-pounders.” She read Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense” and asked how the seminal pamphlet had been received in Congress. “She prided herself on navigating the most important intellectual currents of her era,” biographer Woody Holton writes in Abigail Adams: A Life. “To an extent that does not seem unusual today but that would have astonished her grandmother, Abigail liked to think about her thoughts.”

Fortunately, John also liked his wife’s inclination for reflection. In a teasing letter dated to 1764, the year they married, he wrote that her “habit of reading, writing and thinking” caused her to slouch. He also chided her for sitting too often with her legs crossed, which “springs I fear from the former source vizt. too much thinking. These things ought not to be!” By early 1776, John and Abigail both had a lot on their minds. They longed to speak freely about the creation of a new nation, which was looking more plausible every day. “Is there no way for two friendly souls to converse together although the bodies are 400 miles off?” John wrote. “Yes, by letter. But I want a better communication. I want to hear you think or to see your thoughts.”

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Graham Tomlin in Plough:

On a cold November night in 1654, a young Frenchman, well known in fashionable circles for his scientific experiments and mathematical genius, sat down to pray in his small apartment in Paris. What happened next surprised him. For about two hours, he had an extraordinary experience of the presence of God, which turned his life around and set him on a new trajectory.

The man was Blaise Pascal. He told no one of this experience, but wrote an account of it which he hid in the lining of his jacket. It was found by chance by a servant preparing his body for burial when he died eight years later. The document became known as the Mémorial and the event as Pascal’s “Night of Fire.”

The term “cultural Christianity” has become prominent recently, notably when the public atheist Richard Dawkins described himself as a “cultural Christian.” He claims to enjoy Christmas carols and church architecture, despite not believing a word of Christian doctrine – recognizing, as he put it, “a distinction between being a believing Christian and being a cultural Christian.”

Before his Night of Fire, Pascal was by no means an atheist like Dawkins, or even a mere cultural Christian.

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Sonnet to spring:

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Jessie Sun at Psyche:

Most of us have experienced both how good it can feel and how hard it can be to do the right thing. Helping strangers or supporting a friend can leave you with a deep sense of satisfaction at making a difference in someone’s life. But you’ve likely also felt the strain of showing up for others when you’re already stretched thin, or the discomfort of being honest about a difficult truth. In other words, being good is sometimes uplifting, and sometimes it’s a bit of a drag. These ordinary moments speak to a puzzle that philosophers have long debated: are moral people happier? Or is there some tradeoff between doing good and feeling good?

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Scott Aaronson at Shtetl-Optimized:

I thought that the filmmaker, Daniel Roher, did about as good a job as can be done, in fitting into a 100-minute film a question that honestly seems too gargantuan for any film — the question of the future of life on earth. He tries to hear out every faction: first the AI existential risk people, then the AI optimists and accelerationists like “Beff Jezos,” then the “stochastic parrot” / “current harms” people like Emily Bender and Timnit Gebru, and finally the AI company CEOs (Altman, Amodei, and Hassabis were the three who agreed to be interviewed), with Yuval Noah Harari showing up from time to time to insert deepities.

Roher plays the part of an anxious, curious, uninformed everyman, who finds each stance to be plausible enough while he’s listening to it, and who mostly just wants to know what kind of world his soon-to-be-born son (about whom we get regular updates) will grow up in.

I didn’t think all the interviewees were equally cogent or equally deserved a hearing. But if any viewers were actually new to AI discourse, rather than marinated in it like me, the film would serve for them as an excellent introduction to the parameters of current debate (for better or worse) and to some of the leading representatives of each camp.

More here.  And here’s the trailer…

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Priyam Paul at The Daily Star:

The Daily Star (TDS): Could you elaborate on the origins of secularism in Europe? How did the idea evolve there?

Akeel Bilgrami (AB): ‘Secularism’, first of all, should be distinguished from ‘secularisation’. Both emerged initially in Europe. Secularisation is the name of a process of change—part intellectual, part societal. In the simplest terms, it can be described as a decrease in both religious belief and religious practice, that is, a decrease in belief in God and the myths of creation, as well as a decrease in various practices such as church-going, rituals, habits of religious dress, diet, etc. By contrast, secularism is the name of a political doctrine that sought to usher religion out from having the kind of direct bearing that it so often had on the polity and the state. Your question is about the origins of secularism, not secularisation. But I mention this distinction because there are subtle ways in which these two distinct notions get run together, which, for the sake of clarity, they should not be.

So, for instance, in my view, Kemalist Turkey (or indeed, the Soviet Union) adopted not just secularism but also a kind of state-enforced secularisation, and France, to a much less comprehensive degree, also did that when, for instance, it banned the hijab from being worn in some public places such as schools. In countries like India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, in which there is not as much secularisation as there is in Europe—nor does one expect there to be in the foreseeable future—the point of focus is on secularism.

So now let me answer your question about secularism.

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Karen Stollznow at Aeon Magazine:

In its most literal sense, a bitch is a female dog, and this is also the word’s earliest meaning. Because bitch feels so contemporary, so casually present in everyday speech, it’s easy to assume it’s a relatively recent addition to the language. The etymology, however, tells a different story. ‘Bitch’ meaning ‘female dog’ dates to around 1000 CE, giving the word a pedigree that stretches back more than 1,000 years. It is older than ‘fuck’ and ‘cunt’, and older than many of the insults we now think of as timeless.

In those early centuries, the word didn’t quite look, or sound, the same. Bitch is an Old English word, inherited from Germanic, and during the Anglo-Saxon period it would have been unfamiliar to modern readers. Old English was the spoken and written language of the time, though literacy was limited, and bitch appeared as bicce, pronounced roughly as ‘bitch-eh’. The earliest recorded use of bitch is from a medieval text known as the Medicina de Quadrupedibus – Medicines from Four-Footed Creatures: a compendium of traditional remedies made from animal parts. Originally written in Latin and translated into Old English in the 11th century, the manuscript contains two early examples of bitch used in its literal sense.

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Peter Davidson at Literary Review:

An Oxford-educated Wiltshire gentleman who lost his small estates to lawsuits and debts after the Civil Wars, he was somehow set free by this personal disaster to live, in Auden’s words, ‘a wonderful instead’. Instead of worrying about lawsuits and estate work, he lived on and with his innumerable friends. He travelled and observed places, traditions and monuments, always with a sense that many of his contemporaries, especially during the wars, were intent on the destruction of all these things. His drawn records of the megaliths at Stonehenge and Avebury are still valued today; but so are his records of people’s customs, songs and beliefs, which he gathered in Remaines of Gentilisme and Judaisme (1686–7). Both comic and melancholy, his writings offer a paper museum of people and things. ‘How these curiosities would be quite forgot,’ he writes in his celebrated Brief Lives, ‘did not such idle fellows as I am put them down.’

The context for this delightful sentence about memory comes at the end of one of his most intricate and memorable pieces of writing. His notes for a life of the short-lived beauty Venetia Digby (as edited from Aubrey’s manuscript by Kate Bennett) are haunting: She had a most lovely sweet turn’d face, delicate darke browne haire … her face, a short oval, darke browne eie-browe: about which much sweetness, as also in the opening of her eie-lidds. The colour of her cheeks, was just that of a Damaske-rose: which is neither too hot, nor too pale. 

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Tim Murphy in Harvard Magazine:

Sabbath Queen, the 2025 documentary produced and directed by Sandi DuBowski ’93, opens tensely: in the courtyard of a Manhattan home, Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie prepares to flout the doctrine of the Conservative Judaism movement in which he was ordained by officiating the marriage of two men, Koshin and Chodo. The problem isn’t that they’re gay—Conservatism allows same-sex unions. It’s that Koshin is Jewish and Chodo is not, and the movement forbids interfaith marriage. That opening is intended “to establish a frame,” says DuBowski. “It says to the audience, ‘This is a burning question that the film will return to, and also here are the larger stakes around these two versions of Judaism—one traditional and fundamentalist, and the other progressive and open.’”

That tension is at the heart of Sabbath Queen’s very intense subject, Lau-Lavie, 56, the Israeli-born descendant of one of Judaism’s most prominent dynasties of rabbis. His quest to forge a community of Judaism more in tune with modern life and pluralistic values led him down several paths.

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Kate Mackenzie and Tim Sahay in The Polycrisis:

The illegal war launched by the United States and Israel against Iran has triggered the mother of all commodity-supply shocks. In response to the unprovoked onslaught, Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway between Iran and Oman’s Musandam peninsula, has brought to a standstill the delivery of huge amounts of the world economy’s critical inputs.

Iran is the seventh country to undergo US military intervention in the first fifteen months of Trump’s presidency; five of these seven are rich in oil. Oil wars might make sense if American companies actually wanted to drill more. But they are hesitant to do so when oil is oversupplied and under-demanded. The raid on Caracas in January earned little interest among international oil majors, who were unenthused about the prospect of resuscitating Venezuela’s decrepit infrastructure and bitumen-like oil reserves, despite White House exhortations.

The world has never seen an interruption on this scale to the supply of stuff. It easily surpasses the 1979 oil crisis, sparked by the Iranian revolution, in which crude oil production declined by 4 percent. Forty-seven years later, Hormuz is the passageway for one fifth of the world’s crude oil and one fifth of its liquefied natural gas. It’s also the transit point for a third of exported urea—a feedstock used for making fertilizer which grows the food for an estimated half of the world’s population.

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