Becca Rothfeld at Bookforum:

DON DIEGO DE ZAMA works as a counselor for the provincial Gobernador, but what this post entails is difficult to discern, because he takes great pains to do anything and everything but his job. Instead of performing his duties, he seethes, nurses grudges, squanders his money, erupts into paroxysms of rage, and lusts after women he does not succeed in courting. Occasionally, he performs the odd bureaucratic task or half-heartedly meets with a petitioner, but his true vocation is resentment. He is an Americano—a white man and an officer of the Spanish crown who was born in Latin America, for which reason he cannot aspire to the promotions or privileges afforded his Spanish-born colleagues. At most, he can hope for a transfer to a more central Latin American city and a reunion with his wife and sons, who remain in a distant part of the viceroyalty. In the meantime, he victimizes his mixed-race and Indigenous subordinates, loses his temper, and waits. “My career was stagnating in a post that was, it had been implied from the start, only a stopgap appointment,” he groans. In the first scene of the book, he spots a monkey corpse floating in the water by the docks without drifting further down the river and immediately identifies himself with it: “There we were: ready to go and not going.”

more here.

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Alex Clark in The Guardian:

It starts with a lump on the neck, noticed while shaving and briefly ignored; progresses via a bewilderment of bureaucratic processes to a “gloriously jolly radiologist” dispatching him for a biopsy; and quickly, although not without the delays and mishaps of a painfully overstretched system, lands up with comedian Mark Steel being handed a cancer diagnosis. When Steel asks the consultant whether his tumour is likely to prove fatal, the doctor replies “Touch wood”, and then actually touches some wood; at least, his patient notes, he was being professional about it. Maybe if the cancer had spread, Steel reflects, “they’d offer a more extreme approach and get me to pick up a penny and pass a black cat”.

Cancer is common, and accounts of experiencing its arrival, treatment and – if you’re fortunate – aftermath are hardly rare. But this is not to suggest memoir fatigue. People, and illness itself, are infinitely various, and each chronicle reveals something different in between what have become the tropes of the genre: the shock of the news, the emotional and physical reserves required to endure treatment, the almost inevitably altered perspective on one’s own life and on more existential questions of life and death themselves.

More here.

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Manuel Antonio Córdoba at the LARB:

THE YEAR IS 2008. David Foster Wallace has just died by suicide and every Spanish-language writer is rushing to their blog to post a heartfelt obituary for their favorite North American novelist. Vicente Luis Mora: “I wonder if Wallace will become the Kurt Kobain of North American fiction.” Alberto Fuguet: “Perhaps being a writer is, in fact, a dangerous profession.” Luna Miguel: “Today I mourn my boyfriend’s favorite writer. I have never read him.” In the days and months that followed, David Foster Wallace’s dour face monopolized half a dozen Spanish literary supplements, the journal Quimera devoted a dossier to his legacy, Rodrigo Fresán multiplied his condolences between two countries and their respective cultural magazines (Página 12 and Letras Libres), and Random House Mondadori reprinted and sold several runs of their translation of Infinite Jest (1996).

It was the start of a hunt for the Spanish-language David Foster Wallace.

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Heidi Ledford in Nature:

A slimy barrier lining the brain’s blood vessels could hold the key to shielding the organ from the harmful effects of ageing, according to a study in mice. The study showed that this oozy barrier deteriorates with time, potentially allowing harmful molecules into brain tissue and sparking inflammatory responses. Gene therapy to restore the barrier reduced inflammation in the brain and improved learning and memory in aged mice. The work was published today in Nature¹.

The finding shines a spotlight on a cast of poorly understood molecules called mucins that coat the interior of blood vessels throughout the body and give mucus its slippery texture, says Carolyn Bertozzi, a Nobel-prizewinning chemist at Stanford University in California and a lead author of the study. “Mucins play a lot of interesting roles in the body,” she says. “But until recently, we didn’t have the tools to study them. They were invisible.”

More here.

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Kate Mackenzie and Tim Sahay in Polycrisis:

This month, Trump entered into formal talks with Russia—without Kyiv’s consent—to settle the war in Ukraine, largely on Putin’s terms. And on Friday, speaking with Zelensky in the Oval Office, he and his Vice President JD Vance performed as imperial overlords dressing down their upstart vassal. For Europeans, the once unthinkable prospect of an American departure from Europe has become a palpable possibility. The question on their minds: Can the European Union survive without the transatlantic military alliance that was famously created seventy-five years ago to, in the words of its founding Secretary General, “keep the Germans down, the Russians out, and the Americans in”?

The apparent collapse of Atlanticism as the ruling ideology of European elites has been swift. Germany’s Chancellor-in-waiting Friedrich Merz, a committed Atlanticist—coming from stints at Blackrock and corporate law firms to promote the EU-US Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership—was initially willing to appease the US after Trump’s win in November (offering to buy more American LNG and weapons). But JD Vance’s speech in Munich this month marked a turning point, with Merz denouncing it as an act of electoral interference that was “no less drastic, dramatic, and ultimately no less brazen, than the intervention that we have seen from Moscow.” Following the CDU’s persuasive win at the polls on Monday, Merz cast the US as an enemy of the European project. He urged the Union to build up its own defence capabilities, warning that it was now “five minutes to midnight for Europe.”

Europe is now fully and self-consciously security-constrained. This reality collides with two other foundational constraints. Europe’s self-imposed fiscal limits are infamous (we have argued they leave the continent poorer, weaker, and less green); and its energy constraints exploded into view following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, as gas prices soared and spread throughout the economy.

More here.

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Isabella M. Weber in The Nation:

This week we saw the electoral consequences of a failed economic paradigm: The parties comprising the market fundamentalist conservatives and right-wingers achieved a landslide victory in Germany. The CDU/CSU, led by the former head of Blackrock Germany, Friedrich Merz, won 28.5 percent of the vote and the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), the far-right party of former Goldman Sachs banker, Alice Weidel, won 20.8 percent. What had started as Germany’s “progress coalition” of social democrats, greens, and liberals failed. There were two key turning points: In 2022, the energy crisis in the wake of the Ukraine war hit the country hard, and free-market dogmatism delayed the response to price explosions. In 2023, economists who had long argued that markets were perfectly capable of handling the energy crisis and no major government measures were needed proclaimed that there was “not even a recession.” Without an emergency situation, it appeared as if there was no need to suspend the debt brake, a stringent fiscal rule that tied the government’s hands. Germany did enter a recession, and the economic crisis ultimately brought down the government.

The reasons behind this result? A loss of confidence in the government, a bitter migration debate, the loss of real wages in recent years, and an ongoing economic crisis. In particular, frustration with economic conditions strengthened the far-right AfD. Because when the economic pie starts shrinking, the struggles over how to divide it escalate.

For example, 37 percent of AfD voters and 18 percent of CDU/CSU voters assessed their own economic situation as poor. Tellingly, voters of left-wing and left-liberal parties are significantly less concerned about their economic situation. Even more serious: 85 percent of AfD voters believe that things are not fair in Germany. The overall economic situation was also considered poor by 96 percent of AfD voters and 90 percent of CDU/CSU voters. Here, too, the figures are significantly higher than for the other parties.

More here.

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Farrah Jarral in The Guardian:

Free speech is in permacrisis – or so some would have you believe. Complaints that freedom of speech is under attack come mostly from the political right, from public figures who appear to the naked eye to be extremely free to say and do what they like, and see no irony in doing so via platforms with vast audiences.

These vigorous defenders of free speech also often have a curiously narrow set of interests over which they wish to exercise it. Far from the noble anti-authoritarian roots of the British liberal tradition, these figures – Nigel Farage, for example – prefer to use their platforms to punch down, often against already persecuted minority groups. Rather than wanting freer speech, what they actually want is freedom from the consequences of broadcasting their views. What the right calls cancel culture, philosopher Arianne Shahvisi writes, “is often just the supersized celebrity version of what the rest of us experience all the time: consequences for our mistakes and bigotries. You do something shitty and people distance themselves from you, especially if you refuse to acknowledge your wrongdoing and make amends.”

More here.

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James Carville in The New York Times:

Democrats, let the Republicans’ own undertow drag them away. At this rate, the Trump honeymoon will be over, best case, by Memorial Day but more likely in the next 30 days. And in November 2025, we start turning the tide with what will be remembered as one of the most important elections in recent years: the Virginia governor’s race. From tax enforcers to rocket scientists, bank regulators and essential workers — the Trump administration is hellbent on drastically firing the federal work force, despite the fact that federal civilian employees account for just 3 percent of the federal budget. These workers are highly concentrated in Virginia, home to around 144,000 civilian federal employees. It looks set to be a resounding Republican defeat. This will be the first moment when we can take the offensive back and begin our crusade again.

Half a century ago, Muhammad Ali cemented himself as the greatest heavyweight boxer of all time not by punching his way to glory but by mastering the art of the strategic retreat. Facing George Foreman, who was rolling off 37 knockouts and 40 wins, Ali deployed the famous rope-a-dope strategy, retreating to the ropes of the ring, evading punches right and left, absorbing small jabs, until Foreman’s battery was depleted — and in Round 8 deployed a decisive knockout blow.

It’s Round 1. Let’s rope-a-dope, Dems.

More here.

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Bestiary

A bestiary catalogs
bests. The mediocres
both higher and lower
are suppressed in favor
of the singularly savage
or clever, the spectacularly
pincered, the archest
of the arch deceivers
who press their advantage
without quarter even after
they’ve won, as of course they would.
Best is not to be confused with good—
a different creature altogether,
and treated of in the goodiary—
a text alas lost now for centuries.

by Kay Ryan
from The Best of It
Grove Press NY, 2010

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Alex Hinton at The Conversation:

As an anthropologist of U.S. political culture, I have been studying the Make America Great Again, or MAGA, movement for years. I wrote a related 2021 book, “It Can Happen Here.” And I continue to do MAGA research at places like this year’s CPAC, where the mood has been giddy.

Here are three reasons why the MAGA faithful believe a golden age has begun. The list begins, and ends, with Trump.

1. The warrior hero

Trump supporters contend that after the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attacks, which they consider a “peaceful protest,” Trump became a political pariah and victim.

Like many a mythic hero, Trump’s response was “never surrender.” In 2023, he repeatedly told his MAGA faithful, “I am your warrior, I am your justice.”

Trump’s heroism, his supporters believe, was illustrated after a bullet grazed his ear during an assassination attempt in Pennsylvania in July 2024. Trump quickly rose to his feet, pumped his fist in the air and yelled, “Fight, fight, fight.”

The phrase became a MAGA rally cry and, in February 2025, it has been stamped on CPAC attendees’ shirts and jackets.

After Trump’s 2024 election victory, many Trump supporters dubbed it “the greatest comeback in political history.” MAGA populist Steven Bannon invoked this phrase at a pre-CPAC event on Feb. 19.

When Bannon spoke on the CPAC main stage on Feb. 20, he led the crowd in a raucous “fight, fight, fight” chant. He compared Trump with Abraham Lincoln and George Washington and called for him to run again for president in 2028.

This is despite the fact that Trump running for a third term would violate the Constitution.

More here.

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Boaz Barak at Less Wrong:

The following statements seem to be both important for AI safety and are not widely agreed upon. These are my opinions, not those of my employer or colleagues. As is true for anything involving AI, there is significant uncertainty about everything written below. However, for readability, I present these points in their strongest form, without hedges and caveats. That said, it is essential not to be dogmatic, and I am open to changing my mind based on evidence. None of these points are novel; others have advanced similar arguments. I am sure that for each statement below, there will be people who find it obvious and people who find it obviously false.

1. 1. AI safety will not be solved on its own.
   2. An “AI scientist” will not solve it either.
   3. Alignment is not about loving humanity; it’s about robust reasonable compliance.
   4. Detection is more important than prevention.
   5. Interpretability is neither sufficient nor necessary for alignment. 
   6. Humanity can survive an unaligned superintelligence.

Before going into the points, we need to define what we even mean by “AI safety” beyond the broad sense of “making sure that nothing bad happens as a result of training or deploying an AI model.” Here, I am focusing on technical means for preventing large-scale (sometimes called “catastrophic”) harm as a result of deploying AI. There is more to AI than technical safety.

More here.

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Julia Webster Ayuso at Noema:

The nine Sámi languages still in use have an extensive vocabulary for snow — everything from åppås, untouched winter snow without tracks; to habllek, a light, airy dust-like snow; and tjaevi, flakes that stick together and are hard to dig.

Their terminology to describe reindeer is even more intricate and is used to classify the animals according to sex, age, color, fertility, tameness and more. For example, a reandi is a male reindeer with long antlers, ruvggáladat is a reindeer that has run away from the herd, and čearpmat-eadni is “a female reindeer that has lost its calf of the same year but is accompanied by the previous year’s calf.”

But reindeer herders like Utsi have noticed how quickly their language is fading alongside their changing landscape. Though Northern Sámi is his mother tongue, he is keenly aware of the gaps in his vocabulary — words that don’t seem to make it from one generation to another. “When you talk to someone older today, they have a richer language. They have more words about nature, about formations in nature, animals and reindeer especially. They certainly have more snow words,” said Utsi, who is also a former chair of the language board and vice president of the Sámi Parliament of Sweden. “It’s a source of sorrow for me.”

More here.

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Jon Raymond at The Current:

“The Northwest’s Odyssey”—that’s what the great Puget Sound–born writer Charles D’Ambrosio once called Ken Kesey’s 1964 novel Sometimes a Great Notion. What he meant by that, I think, was that Kesey’s swaggering tale of an antiunion logging family, the Stampers, stands as epic and originary, and possibly the ultimate reference point for any literature written in this region ever after. The book, like the landscape it describes, is a volcanic performance, a thing of great wildness and riverine digression. Charlie was also implying, truthfully enough, that the written word doesn’t go back very far in these parts. He was saying that our most ancient writings are only about three or four generations old.

By this way of thinking, one could argue that Drugstore Cowboy, the 1989 film directed by Portland, Oregon’s own Gus Van Sant, is our New Testament. Unlike Kesey’s novel, with its heroic, Homeric map of the territory, Drugstore Cowboy is a small, moral tale of mercy and transcendence, built on the suffering of a man whose faith is tempted by the tender flesh.

more here.

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Leah Greenblatt at the NYT:

On one of her signature songs, the restless, almost phosphorescent 1976 anthem “Hejira,” Joni Mitchell sits in some cafe, sketching out a life philosophy: “We all come and go unknown/Each so deep and superficial/Between the forceps and the stone.” She sounds majestic but weary, like an eagle or an off-duty Valkyrie. Who are we flightless birds to disagree?

And yet: Such is the enduring lure of Joni-ology, the secular religion of her fandom, that two new meditations on Mitchell have already landed in this youngish year, just over a month apart. Henry Alford’s “I Dream of Joni” and Paul Lisicky’s “Song So Wild and Blue” are not really traditional works of scholarship or biography; footnotes are wielded gently. Instead, Mitchell mostly serves as a mirror and a muse, a blond godhead on which to pin the authors’ respective forms and fascinations.

With a title as pun-perfect as “I Dream of Joni,” you almost can’t blame Alford, the puckish longtime New Yorker writer and humorist, for writing an entire book to justify it.

more here.

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From Science:

Among the most spectacular phenomena in nature is the sight of millions of desert locust (Schistocerca gregaria) juveniles marching together, flowing like a river through the arid habitat of North Africa and consuming vegetation as they go before molting to become devastating swarms of winged adults. Understanding how and why locusts exhibit aligned collective motion is vital for predicting and managing outbreaks. However, present knowledge of the rules that govern the emergence of such complex, patterned behavior and decision-making is based on a handful of theoretical models that recapitulate only some aspects of the observed behavioral patterns. On page 995 of this issue, Sayin et al. (1) describe the integration of field, laboratory, and virtual reality studies to show that prevailing models for explaining collective motion in locusts, and perhaps other systems as well, require revision.

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The Great Watchers

Think of those great watchers of the sky,
the shepherds, the magi, how they looked
for a thousand years and saw there was order,
who learned not only Light would return,
but the moment she’d start her journey.
No writing then. The see-ers gave
what they knew to the song-makers —
the dreamy sons, the daughters who hummed
as they spun, the priestly keepers of story —
and the clever-handed heard, nodded
and turned poems into New Grange,
Stonehenge, The Great Temple of Karnak.

by Nils Peterson
from Loving Darkness a Little

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More here. (Note: In honor of Black History Month, at least one post will be devoted to its 2025  theme of “African Americans and Labor” throughout the month of February)

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