James Panero at The New Criterion:

How did America’s Gilded Age leave its most enduring mark? Through its architecture? Its institutions? By the numbers, the age’s most lasting currency has been its coins and medals. Consider the penny. The sculptor Victor David Brenner designed the Lincoln cent in 1909. Since then, the U.S. Mint has produced nearly five hundred billion pennies featuring Brenner’s obverse design. On August 6, 2012, one such coin minted in 1909, a rare variety featuring Brenner’s initials, touched down on the planet Mars as a passenger on the Curiosity mission. Since the lander used the penny as a calibration target, what is surely mankind’s most remote work of bas-relief sculpture became covered in Martian dust. Closer to home, but equally remote and dust-covered, there is probably a Lincoln cent in the pocket or couch cushion of every American. The New York Times Magazine recently saw fit to publish a cover story slamming the penny’s obsolescence, but no consideration was given to the astonishing success of its design. In the history of the world, no other work of sculpture has been as ubiquitous.

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Leann Davis Alspaugh and John J. Lennon in The Hedgehog Review:

In 2016, an essay arrived in our offices from John J. Lennon, then incarcerated at Attica Correctional Facility in New York. “The Murderer’s Mother” was a personal essay in the best sense: compelling and honest without being self-aggrandizing. John did not rationalize taking the life of a fellow drug dealer on a street in Brooklyn. Nor did he sidestep the psychological toll that his incarceration has taken on his aging mother. After his essay appeared, John and I began corresponding and soon became editorial colleagues and friends. In the summer of 2019, I traveled to Sing Sing Correctional Facility in Westchester County, New York, where I spent the day with John and his family, celebrating his graduation from Mercy College with a bachelor’s degree in behavioral science. John has gone on to become an award-winning journalist writing from prison. This year, his New York Review of Books essay “Peddling Darkness” was a National Magazine Award finalist in reviews and criticism. He is also in the final stages of preparing his book, The Tragedy of True Crime, which will be published by Celadon Books in the fall of 2025. John agreed to talk with me from Sullivan Correctional on how American prisons fail inmates, as well as some ways in which they are improving.

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Steven Levy in Wired:

Jaime Teevan joined Microsoft before it was cool again. In 2006, she was completing her doctorate in artificial intelligence at MIT. She had many options but was drawn to the company’s respected, somewhat ivory-tower-ish research division. Teevan remained at Microsoft while the mother ship blundered its way through the mobile era.

Then, as the calendar flipped into the 2010s, an earth-shattering tech advance emerged. A method of artificial intelligence called deep learning was proving to be a powerful enhancement to software products. Google, Facebook, and others went on a tear to hire machine-learning researchers. Not so much Microsoft. “I don’t remember it like a frenzy,” Teevan says. “I don’t remember drama.” That was a problem. Microsoft’s focus remained largely on milking its cash cows, Windows and Office.

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Bruce Robbins at The Baffler:

Did the novels of the twentieth century accomplish anything? Edwin Frank, who is known for his love of the genre, is convinced they did. In his stylish, selective survey Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel, he focuses on the genre’s formal innovations, which take readers’ minds off their somewhat vulgar appetite for suspenseful plot and relatable character and teach them to be satisfied, instead, with something like a diet of single sentences, exquisitely prepared. The genre’s masterworks urge us to set a slower pace, savoring what each novelist puts on the table and realizing, as we push back our chairs, how much more substantial the meal was than what we thought we wanted.

There is both instruction and pleasure to be had from Frank’s commentaries on modernist sentence-making. In German, as he notes, the run-on sentence doesn’t violate any rules, but Kafka takes the run-on and runs away with it, adding “slight nervous shifts of tone and implication, abrupt introductions of unforeseen elements that are then absorbed without comment, as if expected.” This procedure makes these sentences “an endless surprise, entertaining disconcerting, effortless, tortured, suddenly funny, and wonderfully sad.”

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Eric Cortelessa in Time Magazine:

Trump’s political rebirth is unparalleled in American history. His first term ended in disgrace, with his attempts to overturn the 2020 election results culminating in the attack on the U.S. Capitol. He was shunned by most party officials when he announced his candidacy in late 2022 amid multiple criminal investigations. Little more than a year later, Trump cleared the Republican field, clinching one of the fastest contested presidential primaries in history. He spent six weeks during the general election in a New York City courtroom, the first former President to be convicted of a crime—a fact that did little to dampen his support. An assassin’s bullet missed his skull by less than an inch at a rally in Butler, Pa., in July. Over the next four months, he beat not one but two Democratic opponents, swept all seven swing states, and became the first Republican to win the popular vote in 20 years. He has realigned American politics, remaking the GOP and leaving Democrats reckoning with what went awry.

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Annie Rauwerda at Asterisk:

Asterisk: You’re famous for the Depths of Wikipedia account, where you share factoids from some of the most arcane, interesting, and surprising pages on Wikipedia. But you’re also now a part of the broader Wikipedia community. How did you first get interested in the site, and how has your involvement changed over time? 

Annie Rauwerda: I started back in high school editing typos and adding things that I noticed were missing — like items to lists. But I had never done anything more than that because I was afraid of it because there are so many rules. Like, I’d seen the talk pages. And many of Wikipedia’s policies and guidelines and essays are very wordy.

Then I started the account — even though I felt a little like a phony. But I remember the first time I felt really excited about the Wikipedia community was when I got on a call with the president of Wikimedia, New York City, back in 2020. And she had told me about a guy named Jim who retired from working at the phone company. He worked in that big AT&T building that doesn’t have windows. I don’t know exactly what he did in there — but cables and stuff. Anyway, he’s retired now, and he spends all day biking around New York City and taking photos of infrastructure for Wikipedia, because Google Maps photos — and so many other photos — aren’t freely licensed. And I was like, that’s amazing.

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Jeremy Hsu at New Scientist:

An optical fibre technology can help chips communicate with each other at the speed of light, enabling them to transmit 80 times as much information as they could using traditional electrical connections. That could significantly speed up the training times required for large artificial intelligence models – from months to weeks – while also reducing the energy and emissions costs for data centres.

Most advanced computer chips still communicate using electrical signals carried over copper wires. But as the tech industry races to train large language models and other complex AI systems – a process that requires networks of AI superchips to transfer huge amounts of data – companies are eager to link chips using the light-speed communication of fibre optics.

This technology isn’t new: the internet already relies on undersea fibre-optic cables stretching thousands of kilometres between continents. In order to transmit data between fingernail-size chips, however, companies must connect as many hair-thin optical fibres as possible to the edge of each chip.

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See also this by Scott Aaronson.

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Theo Padnos at Persuasion:

In the fall of 2012, when Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the military power now in charge of Syria, was a mere minor terrorist organization, a band of their fighters in Aleppo took me prisoner. Back then they were known as Jabhat al-Nusra. I remained in the group’s custody for two years—often in solitary confinement cells, but not always. During this time, it often happened that news of some stupendous victory would make its way, via the fighters’ two-way radios, into our prisons. It was a surreal experience then to listen as a government checkpoint got blown into the sky, for instance, or a truckload of government troops fell into my captors’ hands.

What’s going on now, however, is surreal beyond anything I saw or heard when I was in Syria. I’ve spent the past few days watching my former captors’ wildest dreams come true. Actually, I suspect that all Syrians, in every corner of the world, are watching these events unfold in a mood of unremitting shock and awe.

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Patricia Craig at the Dublin Review of Books:

The thing that had precipitated Warner into the literary limelight, and earned her quite a lot of money, was her novel of 1926, Lolly Willowes. As an assertion of female autonomy and idiosyncrasy, it was both timely and captivating. It was also prescient, with its theme of decamping to the country about to be enacted in the life of its author (though perhaps without so sorcerous a resolution). Laura (Lolly) Willowes is a wry old-maidish lady occupying a rather put-upon role in the London household of her married brother, when she suddenly takes flight to a hamlet in the Chilterns called Great Mop, enters into a compact with the Devil and becomes a witch. Despite its subject matter, the book is not excessively whimsical – or its whimsey is tempered by a stern ironic overtone. A style at once mischievous and elegant is one of Warner’s hallmarks, whether it’s applied to a mediaeval nunnery beset by money worries (The Corner That Held Them, 1948), the beguiling and ruthless Cat’s Cradle Book (1960), or the distinctly unfairylike Kingdoms of Elfin (1977), her last subversive flight-of-fancy, carried out with an eldritch inventiveness.

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Daniel Linford at Aeon Magazine:

As the 20th century progressed, questions began to emerge about the Big Bang. Was it truly the Universe’s origin? The observable Universe may once have expanded from a hot, dense state, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the entire Universe did so, or that there was nothing before the hot, dense state.

The FLRW models also came under criticism. Each of them assumed that the Universe is spatially homogeneous and isotropic. Scientists wanted to know if the catastrophe showing up in some FLRW models was a byproduct of such unrealistic assumptions. Because the Einstein field equations are so difficult to solve in anything but the simplest cases, scientists turned to Newton’s theory of gravity for guidance. In some Newtonian models – which involve FLRW-like equations – there’s also a past cataclysm where the gravitational field becomes undefined. But unlike in the FLRW models, Newtonian theory can be extended past the cataclysm.

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Kyle Buchanan in The New York Times:

Nicole Kidman’s eyes widened. “Haven’t you been to the Rockettes?” she asked. “I go every year. Oh yeah, I’m obsessed!”

Over celery root soup at the Empire Diner in Manhattan last week, the 57-year-old Oscar winner regaled me with stories about the high-kicking Christmas spectacular, which she had attended the night before with her children and husband, the singer Keith Urban: “I was saying to my husband, ‘Why do we love it so much?’ And he said, ‘Because it’s a memory. You’re remembering the kid in you.’” Lately, Kidman has been thinking a lot about this sort of thing, tracing her life and career as part of a continuum. Her new film, “Babygirl,” is one such reconnection: Though she has recently been seen in splashy streaming series like “The Perfect Couple” and “Lioness: Special Ops,” it marks a return to the kind of risky, auteur-driven filmmaking she used to be acclaimed for.

“Babygirl” could earn Kidman her sixth Oscar nomination and has already won her the prestigious Volpi Cup for best actress at the Venice Film Festival in September, though Kidman had to miss that ceremony after the death of her mother, Janelle, at 84.

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Morgan Meis at The Easel:

“So strong is the belief in life what is most fragile in life–real life, I mean–that in the end this belief is lost.” This is the first sentence of André Breton’s famous, infamous, notorious, and rarely actually read first Surrealist Manifesto. Breton was born in a small town in Normandy, France in 1896. He was thus a very young man at the outbreak of WWI. As for nearly everyone of that generation, the war was a defining and devastating experience. I myself had an obsession with learning about WWI around ten years ago. I remember reading some first-person accounts of soldiers describing the experience of gas attacks in the trenches of the Western Front. I had to put the book down. It was one of the few times in my life that I found myself literally unable to read through my tears.

Breton spent much of his wartime years at a neurological ward in the city of Nantes as a stretcher bearer and nurse. After Nantes, Breton was a student at the psychiatric clinic for the Second Army in Saint-Dizier. There he was to come into contact with many soldiers suffering from shell shock. Breton became, understandably, preoccupied with madness, neurological disorders, and then, through a correspondence with Sigmund Freud, the emerging psychoanalytic theories of the unconscious. Madness seemed to Breton to make much more sense of the world, inner and outer, than any other theory, especially theories that stressed the rational nature of human, beast, and cosmos.

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David A. Kessler in the New York Times:

As Donald Trump gets ready to return to the White House on Jan. 20, he must be prepared to tackle one issue immediately: the possibility that the spreading avian flu might mutate to enable human-to-human transmission.

I was the Biden administration’s chief science officer during Covid-19. I was a co-leader of Operation Warp Speed, which began in Mr. Trump’s first term to accelerate the development of Covid-19 vaccines. I worked on the purchase and rollout of hundreds of millions of doses and on developing antiviral treatments. One of my jobs was to assess the trajectory of the virus.

Now I am back at my job teaching at the medical school at the University of California, San Francisco. I have been monitoring the spread of bird flu, also known as H5N1, and discussing the situation with colleagues around the country. My concern is growing.

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Noah Smith at Noahpinion:

Excessive prices charged by health care providers are overwhelmingly the reason why Americans’ health care costs so cripplingly much. But they’ve outsourced the actual collection of those fees to insurance companies, so that your experience in the medical system feels smooth and friendly and comfortable. The insurance companies are simply hired to play the bad guy — and they’re paid a relatively modest fee for that service. So you get to hate UnitedHealthcare and Cigna, while the real people taking away your life’s savings and putting you at risk of bankruptcy get to play Mother Theresa.

So the way to make our health care system affordable is not to browbeat insurers, in the hope that they will be able to reduce their profits and pay for us to have cheap health care. Insurance companies simply do not have the power to do that, even if you threaten to shoot them. What we need is to reduce costs within the actual medical system itself.

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Sean Gregory in Time Magazine:

Few jobs require less physical exertion than rebounding for Caitlin Clark. On an early-November morning in downtown Indianapolis, Clark, the two-time college national player of the year for the University of Iowa, reigning WNBA Rookie of the Year from the Indiana Fever, and emergent American sports icon, sprints to different spots along the three-point line at the Fever practice gym, trying to bang as many shots as possible over a six-minute span. A Fever coach has tasked me with standing under the basket to retrieve her misses. But as Clark runs all over the court to launch long-range bombs, I barely have to move. Swish, swish, swish. She hits 14 shots in a row. A dozen in a row. Eleven in a row. Swish, swish, swish. Nine in a row. Another nine.

Sure, she’s putting on this display in practice. But her ability is still mesmerizing. Clark, 22, takes shots with a degree of difficulty never before witnessed in the women’s game; her signature 30-ft. launches, from near half-court on team logos across America, are akin to home-run balls, hanging high in the air. Can she actually make that flabbergasting attempt? Yes! it turns out. Over and over again.

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Davide Castelvecchi in Nature:

Researchers at Google have built a chip that has enabled them to demonstrate the first ‘below threshold’ quantum calculations — a key milestone in the quest to build quantum computers that are accurate enough to be useful. The experiment, described on 9 December in Nature¹, shows that with the right error-correction techniques, quantum computers can perform calculations with increasing accuracy as they are scaled up — with the rate of this improvement exceeding a crucial threshold. Current quantum computers are too small and too error-prone for most commercial or scientific applications.

“This has been a goal for 30 years,” said Michael Newman, a research scientist at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California, at a press conference announcing the feat. The achievement means that by the end of the decade, quantum computers could enable scientific discoveries that are impossible even with the most powerful supercomputers imaginable, said Charina Chou, the chief operating officer of Google’s quantum-computing arm. “That’s the reason we’re building these things in the first place,” Newman added.

“This work shows a truly remarkable technological breakthrough,” says Chao-Yang Lu, a quantum physicist at the University of Science and Technology of China in Shanghai.

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