Matt Richtel in the New York Times:

So sharp are partisan divisions these days that it can seem as if people are experiencing entirely different realities. Maybe they actually are, according to Leor Zmigrod, a neuroscientist and political psychologist at Cambridge University. In a new book, “The Ideological Brain: The Radical Science of Flexible Thinking,” Dr. Zmigrod explores the emerging evidence that brain physiology and biology help explain not just why people are prone to ideology but how they perceive and share information.

This conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity.

What is ideology?

It’s a narrative about how the world works and how it should work. This potentially could be the social world or the natural world. But it’s not just a story: It has really rigid prescriptions for how we should think, how we should act, how we should interact with other people. An ideology condemns any deviation from its prescribed rules.

You write that rigid thinking can be tempting. Why is that?

Ideologies satisfy the need to try to understand the world, to explain it. And they satisfy our need for connection, for community, for just a sense that we belong to something.

More here.

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Ghazal of Glance

First, it was a glance, then sleeplessness
See what love did to Rumi with a glance,

turning away from the mirror, you glimpsed
was it a trance, or what Khusrau  said, a glance

you went away without sending me a farewell
stoned, staring, a dialogue, a dance, a glance

A friend wrote from the Houston Americans
writing ghazals in English, Ah! a concocted stance,

lilt, cadence, and the beloved’s eyes blinking
coy, covering, and yet see that miracle of glance,

Persian and Urdu are alien to Northern palates
In English, you squint and then call it a glance,

In the empty corridors, language is desperate
Your absence is now limited to a mere glance

tear away shyness, rip apart the veil, reveal,
Rizwan is looking askance; return that glance.

by Rizwan Akhtar

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Andrew Marzoni in The Liberties:

Among the many grievances aired by Norman Podhoretz in his insufferable 1967 memoir Making It is an already septic grudge concerning The New Yorker’s publication of James Baldwin’s most famous essay in 1962. Titled, following the magazine’s convention, “Letter from a Region in My Mind,” this twenty-thousand word assemblage of memoir, reportage, and philosophical interrogation of the American condition that has become Baldwin’s rhetorical signature was filed by Baldwin as “Down at the Cross,” the name it would retain when reprinted the next year as the second part of The Fire Next Time.

According to Podhoretz, not long after succeeding Eliot Cohen in the wake of the founding editor’s suicide, he commissioned Baldwin to write a piece on the Nation of Islam, whose ascendance in New York alongside the sect’s most prominent minister, Malcolm X, was disconcerting the magazine’s white, liberal, and mostly Jewish readership. Around the same time, The New Yorker asked Baldwin for a dispatch from Africa, then in the midst of postcolonial revolt. In 1958, longtime fiction editor William Maxwell, an admirer of Baldwin’s first book of essays, Notes of a Native Son, collected from contributions to Commentary, The New Leader, The Reporter, Partisan Review, and Harper’s, had solicited Baldwin for unpublished work, and in July 1961, then-New Yorker EIC William Shawn signed a series of letters addressed to the authorities in the Congo, Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria, and Guinea identifying Baldwin as a New Yorker correspondent.

More here.

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Shelly Fan in Singularity Hub:

“That Cajun blackened shrimp recipe looks really good,” I tell my husband while scrolling through cooking videos online. The presenter describes it well: juicy, plump, smoky, a parade of spices. Without making the dish, I can only imagine how it tastes. But a new device inches us closer to recreating tastes from the digital world directly in our mouths. Smaller than a stamp, it contains a slurry of chemicals representing primary flavors like salty, sweet, sour, bitter, and savory (or umami). The reusable device mixes these together to mimic the taste of coffee, cake, and other foods and drinks.

Developed by researchers at Ohio State University, the device has a tiny gum-like strip linked to a liquid reservoir. It releases each taste component in a gel and pumps the resulting blend onto the tongue. The system is wireless and includes a sensor to control the chemical mixture. In a demonstration, one person dipped the sensor into some lemonade in San Francisco and transferred a facsimile of the taste to people wearing the devices in Ohio in real-time. Complex flavor profiles—say, a fried egg—are harder to simulate. And it’s likely awkward to have a device dangling on your mouth. But the work brings us a little closer to adding a new sense to virtual and augmented reality and making video games more immersive.

More here.

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Nick Davidson at Longreads:

Each balloon carried two copilots vying to prevail in the 1995 Coupe Aéronautique Gordon Bennett, ballooning’s oldest and most prestigious aeronautical race. The goal was to travel the farthest distance possible before landing. Only the world’s most daring and decorated aeronauts could claim a spot in the field. The race typically lasted one or two days, and occasionally stretched into a third. No Gordon Bennett balloon had ever flown a fourth night, but favorable weather and a stretch of newly opened airspace now made that feat attainable for the first time. “It was fabulous, and we knew it,” said Martin Stürzlinger, a member of the ground crew for a balloon called the D-Caribbean.

By noon on Monday, September 11, the race’s third day, only ten of the 15 balloons remained aloft. The rest had flown as far as they could before landing in Austria, Germany, or Poland. From the air, Wallace and Brielmann knew only that their friends Alan Fraenckel and John Stuart-Jervis, who raced under the U.S. Virgin Islands flag, were still flying nearby in the D-Caribbean. The two teams had remained within a couple dozen miles of each other for the race’s duration.

More here.

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Scott Alexander at Astral Codex Ten:

In 2021, a researcher named Daniel Kokotajlo published a blog post called “What 2026 Looks Like”, where he laid out what he thought would happen in AI over the next five years.

The world delights in thwarting would-be prophets. The sea of possibilities is too vast for anyone to ever really chart a course. At best, we vaguely gesture at broad categories of outcome, then beg our listeners to forgive us the inevitable surprises. Daniel knew all this and resigned himself to it. But even he didn’t expect what happened next.

He got it all right.

Okay, not literally all. The US restricted chip exports to China in late 2022, not mid-2024. AI first beat humans at Diplomacy in late 2022, not 2025. A rise in AI-generated propaganda failed to materialize. And of course the mid-2025 to 2026 period remains to be seen. But to put its errors in context, Daniel’s document was written two years before ChatGPT existed. Nobody except researchers and a few hobbyists had ever talked to an AI. In fact, talking to AI was a misnomer. There was no way to make them continue the conversation; they would free associate based on your prompt, maybe turning it into a paragraph-length short story. If you pulled out all the stops, you could make an AI add single digit numbers and get the right answer more than 50% of the time. Yet if you read Daniel’s blog post without checking the publication date, you could be forgiven for thinking it was a somewhat garbled but basically reasonable history of the last four years.

I wasn’t the only one who noticed.

More here.

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Yascha Mounk at his own Substack:

The college essay is a deeply unfair way to select students for top colleges, one that is much more biased against the poor than standardized tests. The college essay wrongly encourages students to cast themselves as victims, to exaggerate the adversity they’ve faced, and to turn genuinely upsetting experiences into the focal point of their self-understanding. The college essay, dear reader, should be banned and banished and burned to the ground.

There are many tangible, “objective” reasons to oppose making personal statements a key part of the admissions process. Perhaps the most obvious is that they have always been the easiest part of the system to game. While rich parents can hire SAT tutors they can’t sit the standardized test in the stead of their offspring; they can, however, easily write the admissions essay for their kid or hire a “college consultant” who “works with” the applicant to “improve” that essay.

More here.

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Leo Goldsmith at The Current:

“Today a technological storm is raging, the result of which will be the ultimate democratization of the cinema.” So reads one of the many pronouncements of Dogme 95’s opening salvo—a manifesto that the movement’s cofounder, Lars von Trier, distributed on red paper to the attendees of a Paris conference on cinema’s first hundred years in 1995.

At that moment, the digital video camera was rapidly proliferating around the globe, penetrating into every crevice of contemporary life. No longer just a tool for recording America’s funniest home videos, soon this technology would be inescapable: everything from car dashboards to ATMs to nurseries to the interior of your large intestine would be outfitted with tiny cameras that could record continuously. By the turn of the millennium, this loose Danish film collective would produce its first handful of feature films in the format, and they would find kin at the opposite end of the film industry in the surprise blockbuster The Blair Witch Project (1999).

more here.

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Alan Dean at n+1:

A half generation younger than New Romanian Cinema’s original luminaries, Jude is at once their artistic peer and inheritor. He has made films firmly within the tradition and films that transgress nearly every axiom that defines it. His corpus includes two realist slow burns, three formally distinct historical films, a hyperreflexive admixture of Godard and Borat, a multimedia sex comedy, and a road-and-labor movie stitched together from the socialist archive and TikTok — and that’s just the feature films. While Jude hasn’t abandoned the guiding interests of New Romanian Cinema — especially its eye for the prosaic — he has also made a name for himself as one of its only directors willing to write and direct films about the Holocaust in Romania, Roma slavery, and contemporary right-wing nationalism, not to mention the internet, pornography, and the scandalous and lowbrow more generally. His triumphant latest, Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, affirms what Gorzo, Lazăr, and other critics have already argued: that Jude’s oeuvre simultaneously makes a claim on the legacy of one of the great film traditions of the 21st century and points to something radically new, for Romanian and world cinema alike.

more here.

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Tessa Hadley and Joanne O’Leary at the LRB:

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Sam Jacobs in Time Magazine:

Much has changed since 2001, when creative director D.W. Pine produced his first cover for TIME. (That cover, for a story about online privacy, rendered a desktop computer as a heavy-duty lock.) In 2010, Steve Jobs showed up at Time Inc. to show off the iPad; the cover would be designed for the tablet, and TIME would become the first newsweekly to launch on the Apple device. In 2014, as social media became the place millions of people came to consume all kinds of news, TIME launched its first moving cover image.

cross all that change, one thing has not: week after week, D.W. has overseen the creation of our cover. Today, we publish the 1,000th cover created by D.W., who first joined TIME in 1998 from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Longevity itself is worth celebrating, and while D.W.’s output alone makes him one of this century’s most influential people in media, it is how he has gone about his work that we want to celebrate.

More here.

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Zeeya Merali in Nature:

Five scientists who contributed to the development of the blockbuster weight-loss drugs Ozempic and Wegovy have picked up one of this year’s US$3-million Breakthrough prizes — the most lucrative awards in science.

Originally developed to treat diabetes, these drugs work by mimicking a hormone called glucagon-like peptide 1 (GLP-1) that controls blood sugar levels and helps to curb appetite. “This class of drugs truly saves lives, changes lives and brings joy back to people’s lives,” says Ziyad Al-Aly, a physician-scientist at the Veterans Affairs St. Louis Health Care System in Missouri, who recently led a massive study analysing data from almost two million people to evaluate the effects of such medication¹.

More here.

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David Adler, Vanessa Romero Rocha, and Michael Galant in Phenomenal World:

On January 12, tens of thousands of Mexican citizens packed into the Zócalo to hear President Claudia Sheinbaum deliver her report on the first 100 days of government. Her announcements reflected an agenda both ambitious in scale and comprehensive in scope: sixteen new laws and twelve constitutional reforms ranging from the recognition of Indigenous peoples and the real increase in the minimum wage, to the recovery of Mexico’s national ownership of natural resources and a crackdown on tax evasion. “Let it be heard loud and clear,” Sheinbaum said. “We will not return to the neoliberal model … We will continue with Mexican Humanism and with the maxim of ‘For the good of all, first the poor.’”

That maxim sits at the heart of the “Fourth Transformation,” the political-economic project inaugurated by Sheinbaum’s predecessor Andrés Manuel López Obrador, or AMLO. Founded during his own campaign for the presidency, AMLO’s National Regeneration Movement (Morena, in its Spanish abbreviation) drew inspiration from the country’s three prior great transformations—the War of Independence (1810–1821), the War of Reform (1857–1861), and the Mexican Revolution (1910–1917). A century on from the Revolution, AMLO claimed to recover its tradition of popular self-determination, proposing “a system of democratic planning of national development” to shape economic growth toward the goals of “independence” and the “political, social, and cultural democratization of the nation.” Sheinbaum now promises to construct a “second storey” atop this political edifice.

The return of “democratic planning” to Mexican governance would mark a sea change in the country’s prevailing political economy.

More here.

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Evgeny Morozov in The Ideas Letter:

There is a certain disorienting thrill in witnessing, over the past few years, the profusion of bold, often baffling, occasionally horrifying ideas pouring from the ranks of America’s tech elite.

Consider the heresies of Balaji Srinivasan and Peter Thiel, who, in celebrating the “network state” and seasteading have hatched an escape doctrine for digital aristocrats. Where Srinivasan conjures blockchain fiefdoms with à la carte citizenship and pay-per-view police forces, Thiel pines for oceanic platforms where the wealthy might float beyond government reach, their libertarian fantasies bobbing like luxury yachts in international waters.

Elsewhere, Silicon Valley’s solutionist overdose has inflated an ideas bubble that rivals its financial ones—a frothy marketplace where grand narratives appreciate faster than stock options. Thus, Sam Altman casually drafts planetary blueprints for AI (non-)regulation and even AI welfare (“capitalism for everyone!”), while crypto acolytes (Marc Andreessen, David Sacks), aspiring celestial colonizers (Musk, Bezos), and nuclear revivalists (Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Altman) offer their own grandiose, exciting solutions to problems of seemingly unknown origin. (Who’s guzzling up all this energy we suddenly need so badly? A true mystery, this.)

But more mundane subjects, from foreign policy to defense, increasingly preoccupy them too. Eric Schmidt—a man whose personality could be mistaken for a blank Google Doc—has not only penned two books with Henry Kissinger but also regularly contributes to Foreign Affairs and other such factories of doom and dogma. And he is after big, meaty subjects, the kind that demand somber nods at think-tank luncheons. “Ukraine is losing the drone war” proclaims a piece of his from January 2024. Could this be – a pure coincidence, surely – the same Eric Schmidt, who, just months earlier, launched a drone company?

More here.

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Amber Dance in Smithsonian:

Back in 2014, a woman with advanced cancer pushed Adrienne Boire’s scientific life in a whole new direction. The cancer, which had begun in the breast, had found its way into the patient’s spinal fluid, rendering the middle-aged mother of two unable to walk. “When did this happen?” she asked from her hospital bed. “Why are the cells growing there?” Why, indeed. Why would cancer cells migrate to the spinal fluid, far from where they’d been birthed, and how did they manage to thrive in a liquid so strikingly poor in nutrients? Boire, a physician-scientist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, decided that those questions deserved answers.

The answers are urgent, because the same thing that happened to Boire’s patient is happening to increasing numbers of cancer patients. As the ability to treat initial, or primary, tumors has improved, people survive early rounds with cancer only to come back years or decades later when the cancer has somehow resettled in a new tissue, such as brain, lung or bone. This is metastatic cancer, and it’s the big killer—while precise numbers are scarce, anywhere from half to the large majority of cancer deaths have been attributed to metastasis. Offering people more options and hope will mean understanding how those cancers successfully migrate and recolonize.

The prevalence of metastasis belies the arduous journey that cancer cells must make to achieve it.

More here.

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Jill Lepore in The New York Times:

Four years ago, I made a series for the BBC in which I located the origins of Mr. Musk’s strange sense of destiny in science fiction, some of it a century old. This year, revising the series, I was again struck by how little of what Mr. Musk proposes is new and by how many of his ideas about politics, governance and economics resemble those championed by his grandfather Joshua Haldeman, a cowboy, chiropractor, conspiracy theorist and amateur aviator known as the Flying Haldeman. Mr. Musk’s grandfather was also a flamboyant leader of the political movement known as technocracy.

Leading technocrats proposed replacing democratically elected officials and civil servants — indeed, all of government — with an army of scientists and engineers under what they called a technate. Some also wanted to annex Canada and Mexico. At technocracy’s height, one branch of the movement had more than a quarter of a million members. Under the technate, humans would no longer have names; they would have numbers. One technocrat went by 1x1809x56. (Mr. Musk has a son named X Æ A-12.) Mr. Haldeman, who had lost his Saskatchewan farm during the Depression, became the movement’s leader in Canada. He was technocrat No. 10450-1.

More here.

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