Jeannette Cooperman at The Common Reader:

If Altman likes you, he will recommend that you read The Beginning of Infinity, by a British physicist who believes all evils and failures are due to insufficient knowledge. “Everything that is not forbidden by laws of nature is achievable, given the right knowledge.” We have entered “the beginning of infinity,” a period of unbounded progress.

But if Altman really believes this, why is he stockpiling guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, and gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force in his prepper house?

Worst-case: Privately, Altman does recognize the risk of societal collapse, and he is just in this for the rush of power and the influx of cash. He is nonchalant about his racecars; he keeps the casual wardrobe and informality of the tech bro and gets excited about concepts so abstract, they are almost spiritual. Yet materialism keeps slipping in.

More here.

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Theo Zenou at The New Statesman:

As far back as he can remember, Martin Scorsese always wanted to be a priest. To him, being a priest was better than being  president of the United States. The story goes something like this. Roll sound. Roll camera. Action!

The year was 1953, and the scene was the Little Italy neighbourhood in New York City. Scorsese, 11, lived in a cramped apartment with his parents and older brother. His uncle resided in the same building. His grandparents were just down the street. But outside that warm family cocoon, the world frightened Scorsese. The mean streets of the Lower East Side swarmed with tough guys, loan sharks and swindlers. They stood on street corners, keeping watch, cracking jokes, trading stories. When things got bad, they traded punches. When things got really bad, they traded bullets.

Luckily, Scorsese didn’t have to venture outside too often. Doctor’s orders: he suffered from severe asthma. “I lived a life apart,” he later said. “I felt separate from everyone else.” From his bedroom window, Scorsese looked down, committing everything he saw to memory.

more here.

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Anthony Aguirre at Control Inversion:

This paper argues that humanity is on track to develop superintelligent AI systems that would be fundamentally uncontrollable by humans. We define “meaningful human control” as requiring five properties: comprehensibility, goal modification, behavioral boundaries, decision override, and emergency shutdown capabilities. We then demonstrate through three complementary arguments why this level of control over superintelligence is essentially unattainable.

First, control is inherently adversarial, placing humans in conflict with an entity that would be faster, more strategic, and more capable than ourselves — a losing proposition regardless of initial constraints. Second, even if perfect alignment could somehow be achieved, the incommensurability in speed, complexity, and depth of thought between humans and superintelligence renders control either impossible or meaningless. Third, the socio-technical context in which AI is being developed — characterized by competitive races, economic pressures toward delegation, and potential for autonomous proliferation — systematically undermines the implementation of robust control measures.

More here.

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Damon Linker at Persuasion:

How should we understand the character of the American political present?

Are we living through the radical transformation of American democracy into a competitive (or even uncompetitive) authoritarian system?

Or are we merely experiencing the fulfillment of longstanding antiliberal and anti-democratic trends in American politics in general and the Republican Party in particular?

Or do we merely find ourselves at a rare (but nonetheless democratically legitimate) moment of rapid constitutional evolution to the right after nearly a century of consistently leftward shifts?

These possibilities form the core of one of the best essays I’ve read about the second Trump administration.

More here.

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Laura Tran in The Scientist:

In the 13^th century, unusual skin lesions resembling wolf bites led to the term “lupus,” meaning “wolf” in Latin. These symptoms also took the form of a butterfly across the face and to other parts of the body, hinting at a deeper, more complex condition. Centuries later, researchers provided evidence of lupus as an autoimmune disease, in which overactive T and B cells turn against one’s own body.

Upon activation, B cells undergo differentiation through the germinal center (GC) or extrafollicular (EF) pathways. Notably, those from the EF pathway are a prominent source of autoantibody production, but the mechanism behind their development from naive cells into this state is not fully understood.¹ This motivated immunologist Michael Carroll at Harvard Medical School to pinpoint key factors that drive this process.

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An Endless Storm

The distance between a thing and its name:
A waste land, an anarchy, a maelstrom,
A fictive space, an endless storm on Jupiter.

What are one’s poems about? About how one
Thinks in language, how language gets in the way of thinking.

How one fails to acknowledge the bitterness of beauty:
Its uncorrupted substance, its quintessence,
The uneasy scribbles like hesitation marks.

by Eric Pankey
from Plume Magazine

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Jeremy Noel-Tod at Literary Review:

Seamus Heaney was a self-consciously self-made poet. In his essay ‘Feeling into Words’, he gives one of the best accounts available of ‘finding your voice’ as a writer. There were early stirrings of poetry in listening to his mother recite the Latin grammar of her schooldays; the ‘beautiful sprung rhythms’ of the BBC shipping forecast and ‘the litany of the Blessed Virgin that was part of the enforced poetry’ of a Catholic household. He learned to articulate the feelings these induced through reading English poetry at school, and in particular ‘the heavily accented consonantal noise’ of Gerard Manley Hopkins, in whose ‘staccato’ music Heaney heard an encouraging echo of his own ‘energetic, angular’ Ulster accent.

This sage essay was given as a lecture in 1974 to the Royal Society of Literature, less than a decade after Heaney composed the debut that would establish his reputation, Death of a Naturalist (1966). Although early student poems were published under the pseudonym ‘Incertus’, there was no long struggle towards maturity and recognition: Heaney arrived fully conscious of what he was about, with a product whose quality was evident straight out of the box.

More here.

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John Pavlus in Quanta:

The mathematical conundrums that Marijn Heule has helped crack in the last decade sound like code names lifted from a sci-fi spy novel: the empty hexagon(opens a new tab). Schur Number 5(opens a new tab). Keller’s conjecture, dimension seven. In reality, they are (or, more accurately, were) some of the most stubborn problems in geometry and combinatorics, defying solution for 90 years or more. Heule used a computational Swiss Army knife called satisfiability, or SAT, to whittle them into submission. Now, as a member of Carnegie Mellon University’s Institute for Computer-Aided Reasoning in Mathematics, he believes that SAT can be joined with large language models (LLMs) to create tools powerful enough to tame even harder problems in pure math.

“LLMs have won medals in the International Mathematical Olympiad, but these are all problems that humans can also solve,” Heule said. “I really want to see AI solve the first problem that humans cannot. And the cool thing about SAT is that it already has been shown that it was able to solve several problems for which there is no human proof.”

More here.

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Bulbul Ahmed in The Conversation:

For decades, the United Nations has intervened in Haiti in a bid to address persistent political, economic and security crises. To date, all attempts have failed.

Now, the international body is trying something new. On Sept. 30, 2025, the United Nations Security Council approved an expanded international military force for Haiti in hopes of turning the tide against organized criminal gangs that have taken hold of swaths of the Caribbean nation.

Resolution 2793 authorized the doubling of U.N.-backed military and police forces to more than 5,000 and transforming the Kenya-led Multinational Security Support mission in place since 2023 into a new Gang Suppression Force.

Operational command of the mission will now be held by a coalition of nations including Kenya, Canada, Jamaica, the Bahamas, El Salvador, Guatemala and the United States. Meanwhile, the U.N. will provide logistical, administrative and political assistance through the newly established U.N. Support Office in Haiti.

Yet the true significance of Resolution 2793 lies not in its military content or its specific application in Haiti, but rather in its institutional design.

More here.

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Michael Shearman at the Dublin Review of Books:

‘Perhaps it’s meditation by another name, but at this stage it’s become a necessity’, said Seamus Heaney about his ‘habit of deep preparation’ for poetry readings. Regardless of their size or significance, he would spend at least two or three hours considering what to read.

It means that each reading attains a sense of its own occasion. You may be speaking the same poems, but they are part of something intended, they aren’t just inclusions in some accidental or incoherent bundle of things. It means you can give out and keep to yourself at the same time.

Heaney alludes here to WB Yeats, who wrote, ‘Even when the poet seems most himself … he is never the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast; he has been reborn as an ideal, something intended, complete.’ This idea was important to Heaney. Elsewhere he defined poetic ‘technique’ as that which effects this transformation, ‘that whole creative effort of the mind’s and body’s resources to bring the meaning of experience within the jurisdiction of form’. If you work your experience into a finished form, you can share it without embarrassment, even if it is very intimate. You can give out while keeping to yourself, seem most yourself while being something else. ‘The truth of it comes home to you,’ said Heaney, ‘when you happen to be served with the untransformed material.

more here.

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Laurie Anderson at Artforum:

In the 1970s I went to a lot of very long Bob Wilson performances, among them the legendary Deafman Glance (1970) and A Letter for Queen Victoria (1974). They lasted for hours; some were all night. I often watched from the top of the nosebleed balcony—sometimes wrapp­ed in a sleeping bag, the images onstage mixing with my dreams. Even now I’m not sure whether I dreamed something or saw it in a Bob Wilson performance.

When I began as an artist, Bob was my teacher of the biggest things I was struggling to learn about: time, meditation, light, and theater.

Once, a few years ago, I was walking across Fourteenth Street and I saw a very tall man who seemed to be standing in the middle of the sidewalk. There were two other shorter men next to him. As I approached them from behind, I had the feeling I was walking at triple speed, as if zipping past them on a moving walkway. As I passed, I saw that the tall man was Bob Wilson. “Hello, Bob!!” I said as I sped by. He smiled and made the short bird croak that he used as a laugh. “Lauuuuurie! Only four more hours to go!” It was then that I saw what was in front of us, hanging over the Hudson River at the end of the street: an enormous glowing orange ball, like something from an Egyptian myth.

more here.

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Peter Diamandis in Singularity Hub:

So who is Ray Kurzweil?

He has received 20 honorary doctorates, has been awarded honors from three U.S. presidents, and has authored 7 books (5 of which have been national bestsellers). He is the principal inventor of many technologies ranging from the first CCD flatbed scanner to the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind. He is also the chancellor and co-founder of Singularity University, and the guy tagged by Larry Page to direct artificial intelligence development at Google. In short, Ray’s pretty smart… and his predictions are amazing, mind-boggling, and important reminders that we are living in the most exciting time in human history.

Ray’s predictions for the next 25 years

By the 2030s, virtual reality will begin to feel 100% real. We will be able to upload our mind/consciousness by the end of the decade. By the 2040s, non-biological intelligence will be a billion times more capable than biological intelligence (a.k.a. us). Nanotech foglets will be able to make food out of thin air and create any object in physical world at a whim. By 2045, we will multiply our intelligence a billionfold by linking wirelessly from our neocortex to a synthetic neocortex in the cloud.

More here.

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Tessy Schlosser in The Ideas Letter:

On September 26 of this year, the streets of Mexico City once again filled with the faces and the voices of Ayotzinapa. Eleven years after the disappearance of forty-three students, the annual march has become part of a ritual calendar of protest: Names are spoken, banners are carried, justice is invoked. One demand is made—if the students were taken alive, they must be returned alive. “Vivos se los llevaron, vivos los queremos.” To say “they were taken alive” is to insist they might still be alive, suspended in a space where truth has yet to land. Investigations attempt to find that truth, often without resolution. A commission for “truth and access to justice” was established in December 2018 by presidential decree, exclusively dedicated to the Ayotzinapa case. The same demand is repeated. For most, September 26 has become a metronome of remembrance, a rhythm by which a nation counts its failures and measures its inability to face the disappearance not only of those forty-three students, but of the hundreds of thousands of others—most without marches, investigations, or commissions—who have been killed or who have gone missing over the past two decades.

Earlier that month, a UN independent commission—and Mexico’s own president—had called Israel’s campaign in Gaza a genocide. The calendar of the law, local or international, is procedural: It moves through hearings and rulings, through words that aim to gel events into crimes—“enforced disappearance,” “crimes against humanity,” “genocide.” These nouns aspire to tame violence by naming it. The law’s grammar seeks finality, the closure of history. Its aspiration is almost eschatological, with its promise that once a harm is labeled, the world might forever hold still. The law wants to stop time momentarily to address what has been done and prevent the past from repeating itself in the future. Sometimes a ruling brings relief, but even then, its language keeps moving under the surface: searching, yearning, raging, hurting, assessing, doubting.

More here.

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Liu Peilin and Han Wei in Caixin Global:

A global race to dominate artificial intelligence (AI) is driving an unprecedented semiconductor spending spree, pitting America’s strategy of massive capital investment against China’s urgent push for self-sufficiency in the face of U.S. sanctions. The chase for AI supremacy has turned chipmakers in both countries into red-hot investment targets.

Over the past month, U.S.-based OpenAI, the world’s largest AI startup, has signed procurement deals with three semiconductor giants — Broadcom Inc., Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD), and Nvidia Corp. The combined orders carry a staggering combined power requirement of 26 gigawatts, enough electricity to power nearly three New York Cities at peak demand. It is a testament to the brute-force, capital-intensive strategy the U.S. is deploying to win the AI race.

While Washington is leveraging deep capital markets to fund its technical dominance, China — increasingly cut off from top-tier American technology — is taking a pragmatic path of domestic substitution. It is building a self-reliant ecosystem and rolling out AI applications at scale. A new generation of homegrown chipmakers and AI firms is emerging, reshaping global supply chains in the process.

The central question now facing the industry is which path will lead to the shores of artificial general intelligence, or AGI, first — a race that is likely to define the technological and geopolitical landscape for decades to come.

More here.

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Pranab Bardhan interviews Partha Chatterjee over at his substack:

Pranab Bardhan (PB): 1. In your book you make an important and unconventional distinction between the nation-state and the people-nation. For readers unfamiliar with this, can you elaborate a bit on this with examples? In my substack post of June 18, 2025 I made a distinction between state-centric nationalism in India (as, for example, that usually associated with Nehru, Patel and Ambedkar, and I suppose also Savarkar) and society- or community-centric nationalism (often associated with Tagore and Gandhi). I think you emphasize the regionally diverse imaginings of the nation expressed in varieties of local print languages (I presume this is in the broad analytical framework of Benedict Anderson’s classic work on nationalism, Imagined Communities). But you seem to find the Tagore-Nehru-Gandhi pluralist (’unity in diversity’) idea of India almost as limited as the more malign Hindu-nationalist idea. Are you suggesting that both are based on a possibly shallow or blinkered understanding of Indian history?

Partha Chatterjee (PC): The two views are not shallow, but both may be said to be blinkered. The state-centric as well as the community-centric view takes the present-day entity called India as a singular object endowed with a long civilizational history going back to the distant past. The difference between the two is that the first view traces that civilizational history through the succession of imperial state formations from the Maurya to the Mughal, the Maratha and the British, while the second prefers to locate it in the cumulative but stable arrangement of social relations within rural communities. Both views depend heavily on the historical scholarship in the English language of European, and later Indian, writers in the 19^th and 20^th centuries.

What both views ignore is that the consciousness of being a nation spread only in the early 20th century from a bilingual middle-class literati to wider sections of the people through speeches, histories, songs, poetry, fiction and performance in the regional languages. The resultant image of the Indian nation varied considerably from one regional cultural formation to another. This is what I call the history of the people-nation.

More here.

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