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Joseph Lawler in The New Atlantis:

Think of what the typical American city looks like today: its hollowed-out core dotted with parking lots, its run-down inner-city neighborhoods, its sprawl.

How did this happen? Cities weren’t like this a hundred years ago. They were real cities in the sense in which most people would understand the word, with jobs, businesses, houses, churches, and every other institution related to daily life concentrated around a dense center. Today, cities are almost the inverse of that, with a large population settled out in sprawl, and a hollowed-out center where far fewer people live.

Conversations about this transformation typically collapse into a focus on attitudes about cars. On one extreme, urbanists blame an American fetish for SUVs and highway construction for our lack of charming walkable neighborhoods and the destruction of areas that might have developed into such places. On the other extreme, suburbanists view urbanists as anti-car fanatics who want to use government policy to choke off the low-density single-family housing development that has characterized America since World War II.

What they both tend to overlook is that almost all Americans today have spent their entire lives under a set of federal laws and rules that have helped hollow out the cores of our cities.

More here.

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Alexandra Witze in Nature:

If all goes to plan, as soon as tomorrow, NASA will launch four people on a journey around the Moon. The mission, known as Artemis II, would be the first time humans have left Earth’s protective environment and travelled into deep space since the US Apollo programme, which ended more than half a century ago. And it could carry its astronauts farther from Earth than any humans have ever travelled.

Artemis II is one in a series of missions that ultimately aim to build humanity’s first permanent base on the Moon. This mission is supposed to test the rocket, crew capsule and other space-flight hardware that NASA wants to use to land humans on the lunar surface in the coming years. During their nearly ten-day journey to the Moon and back, astronauts plan to run experiments that will set the stage for future explorers.

“What we’re trying to do is not pick up where Apollo left off, but to use our decades of experience and knowledge and planning to do this sustainable presence on the Moon — and then to do science alongside of that,” says Barbara Cohen, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

More here.

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Shelly Fan in Singularity Hub:

A mixture of bacteria lounge in a dish. Like the bugs populating our guts, most are benign or beneficial. But a deadly strain hides among them. These bacteria can easily escape last-line antibiotics, rapidly spread, and cause mayhem. But in this case, a single dose of genetically engineered cells hunts them down and wipes out nearly the entire population in a day, while leaving all the other harmless cells alone.

This strategy, called minicell therapy, fights fire with fire: Researchers engineer hunter cells by stripping bacteria of the ability to replicate and then genetically loading them up with proteins to home in on dangerous foes. The cells grab their targets and inject toxins into them, releasing a hurricane of chemicals that causes the bacteria’s insides to collapse.

More here.

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Paterson: Early Winter, ’78’

—for Ed Smith

I will see you once again
on the long silver train
people call “night”.

The sizzling green neon
of Van Houten Ave. pizzeria
will smooth the wrinkles
of your corduroy coat

& it’ll be what we expected
of that time and of that place
&, so, let it all slide into
the crisp russet Meadowlands.

Sun will rise again on the good friends
we once had, now dreaming on the sly
as we cash in the empties from our karma
& become an animation of two guys
walking through the paradise
that New Jersey once was.

by Joel Lewis
from The Rutherford Red Wheelbarrow, 2010

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Hannah Katznelson at The Hedgehog Review:

At the beginning of On the Nature of Things, a sort of textbook of Epicurean philosophy, the Roman poet Lucretius explains his choice to write in verse by comparing his poem to a cup of bitter medicine whose rim has been smeared with honey. Just as young patients will heal quicker if they enjoy taking their medicine, young students will benefit from encountering Epicurus’s difficult but edifying doctrine in a form they find pleasurable, even if that pleasure is only “lip-deep.” Arnoud S.Q. Visser’s On Pedantry: A Cultural History of the Know-It-All, a book about how intellectuals ranging from Socrates to Dr. Strangelove have made themselves disliked, takes a similar view of intellectual effort and enjoyment. The book is full of useful considerations for pedants hoping to be less irritating, but Visser ultimately considers that irritation the cost of doing business: Worthwhile intellectual work is unavoidably challenging, and sometimes even unpleasant.

Visser, an intellectual historian and scholar of Renaissance humanism at Utrecht University who has been as prolific writing for popular audiences as for academic ones, does a wonderful job of candy-coating this bitter pill. On Pedantry is relaxed and inviting; it is economical but judicious with historical detail, and discreet in its erudition.

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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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