Arjun Appadurai in The Wire:
The shocking West Asian war unleashed by the USA and Israel is a source of relief to Donald Trump because it has temporarily taken media attention away from his greatest domestic scandal, his long and sordid ties with the deceased sex trafficker, Jeffrey Epstein. But the Epstein story will return to haunt Trump forever.
It is now evident that Jeffrey Epstein was both a financial conman and a depraved sex trafficker. These were his twin paths to cross breeding the most disparate elites on both sides of the Atlantic, and well beyond. He was the patriarch of what is now often called The Epstein Class. The connection between the sexual and financial elements of his career merit a closer look, which involves two keywords in modern finance: leverage and derivatives.
More here.
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In the Georgics, a lyrical guide to agriculture published in 29 BCE, the Roman poet noted that “
Nothing magnifies life — in the proper sense of the word, rooted in the Latin for “to make greater, to glorify” — more than the act of noticing its details, and nothing sanctifies it more: Kneeling to look at a lichen is a devotional act. We 
Many publishers don’t explicitly prohibit authors from using A.I. in their book contracts. Instead, they rely on longstanding contractual clauses that require writers to affirm that their work is “original,” which many people in the book business now interpret as effectively banning the use of A.I. for text or image creation.
If you’re an electricity nerd like me, this is an exciting moment. Earlier this month, TerraPower—the 
David Goodhart: The anywhere–somewhere value divide clearly contributed enormously to both the Brexit vote in 2016 in the UK and Trump’s first election in that same year, and indeed his reelection. The anywhere worldview, as you implied, is that of the highly educated, people comfortable with mobility, partly because they have often experienced it by attending residential universities. They are part of a world where change is something they can take in stride. Openness and autonomy come naturally because of their experiences as mobile graduates. It leans toward a natural kind of liberalism. Of course, they then go on into jobs that pay them well and confer high status.
The 
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Much of literary culture regards the Gothic genre as an archaic embarrassment—gloomy ruins and paranormal lovers that serious practitioners have learned to dismiss. Yet such dismissals neglect a basic fact of literary history. Intimations of demonic realms and spectral forces emerged in tandem with the English novel, several early examples of which featured devil pacts, reanimation, ghost ships, and homunculi. Furthermore, neither British Romanticism nor French Symbolism would have been as consequential or interesting without Gothic writings by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Baudelaire. Indeed, one could argue that a nascent version of European Modernism emerged in the mid-1800s when Baudelaire began publishing his translations of Poe’s fiction, an enterprise foundational to the composition of Les Fleurs du mal (first published in 1857, definitive edition posthumously in 1868).
“Bitch” is a word with bite. Once a straightforward insult, it is now used in so many different ways that it’s no longer clear what it means. Bitch is a linguistic chameleon: there are good bitches and bad bitches; boss bitches and perfect bitches; sexy, difficult, dangerous or even psycho bitches. After so many variations and attempts to reject or reclaim the word, some now wear the label defiantly, while others still have it thrown at them. Its evolution is messy, complicated and revealing.
A German mathematician, Gerd Faltings, is this year’s winner of the Abel Prize, an honor that is regarded as mathematics’ version of the Nobel Prize. Dr. Faltings, 71, is best known for solving a problem that had puzzled mathematicians for decades. He showed that a class of equations possessed a finite number of solutions.
In Immanuel Kant’s Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (1783), Oliver sounded almost comically exasperated as he responded to a rambling critique Kant makes of David Hume (whom Oliver revered): “Immanuel,” he wrote, as if speaking directly to the philosopher across the centuries, “you are totally confused!”
For decades, economists have known that using gross domestic product (GDP) alone 
Pakistan as a possible mediator in America’s war against Iran is not a surprise. Pakistan and its powerful military leader, Gen. Asim Munir, has held meetings with both Iran and Saudi Arabia, spoke out against the war in Iran, while ensuring Saudi Arabia the security pact the two have signed is airtight and inviolable.