Rowan Wilson at Aeon Magazine:
In April 1649, the earth of St George’s Hill in Surrey, England, was disturbed. A group of men and women calling themselves the ‘True Levellers’, known to history as the ‘Diggers’, had taken to the ‘wast[e] ground’ in the parish of Walton to protest enclosure, the process by which common land was parcelled into units of private property, stripping commoners of their traditional rights of access and usage. The land was bad – ‘nothing but a bare heath & sandy ground’, surveyors reported in 1650 – but the Diggers believed it could be made fruitful.
Over the coming weeks and months, they husbanded the earth, composting burnt turf, digging parsnips, planting carrots and beans. They even built cottages. Many knew the land well: the historian John Gurney estimated that about a third of the Diggers were local inhabitants. Their choice to join the Digger project was likely informed by years of local struggle: conflict with landlords, heavy Civil War taxation, the burdensome passage of troops through villages. But the object of their protest – enclosure – was hardly an issue confined to Walton: over several centuries, landowners across England had become ever more hungry to expropriate the commons from the commoners.
more here.
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Through a stroke of good fortune, Elon Musk’s otherwise disastrous purchase of Twitter has turned into one of the great business acquisitions of all time. Buying control of a president was a start. What if the deal bought him something even more valuable?
Autism spectrum disorder, or autism, is a neurodevelopmental disorder. People with the disorder may have deficits in social communication and interaction and restricted and repetitive patterns of behavior, interests, or activities. Autism is really a construct, an idea that there is something different about people who have very basic deficits or difficulties in social communication, starting very young, and also certain repetitive or sensory differences compared to neurotypical people.
The term “first-world problem” is used to describe the type of minor nuisance that occupies the minds of the bourgeoisie. You dropped an AirPod in the urinal. You spilled chardonnay on the divan. Whole Foods was out of pomegranates. And so forth. These are perfectly real frustrations, but they only afflict the comfortable. We might define a parallel quandary in the field of moral philosophy: the first-world ethical problem. These are dilemmas about right and wrong that don’t actually touch any of the major ethical crises of our time or issues of structural injustice. They’re problems that only arise or seem worthy of spending time on once you reach a certain level of wealth and privilege. The New York Times advice column, 
Advanced AI will transform possibilities, and our future will depend on which become real. Deep uncertainties make an AI arms race risky for all sides, yet AI also creates opportunities for unprecedented security. The key challenge isn’t technical feasibility — advanced AI can do that heavy lifting — but navigating from competition to cooperation against the friction of reality: institutional inertia, expectations rooted in thousands of years of state conflict, and sheer failure to recognize unprecedented options.
Clara Collier: To start, do you want to give us a quick background of the book and your research?
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Koethe’s taste for self-contradiction or self-revision, and for rambling free-associative structures of “meditation gone awry” (as he puts it in the poem “Naturalism”) that move around in strange eddies before circling back to some revised perception of their starting point, may seem surprising in a poet whose day job has been in a philosophy department, where logical consistency and a rigorous organization of argument are valued. But then this is the philosopher-poet who once proclaimed, flatly, “I don’t like poems about philosophy.” His poetry seems to be the place for everything philosophy doesn’t know what to do with, for what in “Against Materialism” he calls, “Things so commonplace it’s easy to forget how strange they are” but which “Make up the furniture of the world, and if none of them pass muster metaphysically, / So what?”
Amis’s writing is stylish and screwy and grotesque and vulgar. The jokes come at an unhinged pace. He was an exquisite writer of the male body and the horrors of inhabiting one: “My hair hung on my head as if it were a cut-price toupée,” Charles Highway (Charles Highway!) reflects in Amis’s debut novel The Rachel Papers. That same character savages the “Big Boys” that are his pimples and speaks of “laundering my orifices,” as “they went all to hell if not scrupulously maintained.” A genital region is referred to as a “rig.” The names, across his books, are insane. Amis calls characters things like Spunk, 13, Fart Klaeber, Sod. A female cop (or as she calls herself “a police”) is named Mike Hoolihan. A quartet of violent dogs are Joe, Joel, Jeff, and Jon. That he called a writer-character Martin Amis, or so the 
In 1944 after the liberation of Majdanek, where the soviet troops discovered warehouses of shoes and human hair, the term “death factory” gained general currency. Through wartime propaganda channels the Soviet pamphlet, Majdanek the death factory near Lublin by Konstantin Simonov acquired a circulation in the West. In the exhibitionary complex of the holocaust, the shoes from the Majdanek warehouse have become another icon, especially since a large collection of them were donated to the Holocaust memorial museum in Washington DC.
One July afternoon in 2024, 
Among the cognitive debilities that occur over time is rigidity in one’s fundamental outlook and assumptions about life. One’s outlook is usually set relatively early in life; usually by early adulthood you are either a liberal or a conservative; a nationalist or an internationalist; a risk-taker or someone habitually fearful and cautious. There is a lot of happy talk among gerontologists about how people can remain open to new ideas and able to reinvent their lives late in life, and that certainly happens with some individuals. But the truth of the matter is that fundamental change in mental outlooks becomes much less likely with age.
I 
Google “Richard Foreman” and one of your first hits will invariably be the treasured playwright and director’s New York Times obit, which lists a cavalcade of prestigious awards as calculable proof of both his profound significance and old-school avant-garde don’t-give-’em-what-they-want bona fides. The first search page will inevitably include a link to Ontological.com, homepage of the Ontological-Hysteric Theater, the company Foreman established in 1968 to stage Angelface, his first produced play, at Jonas Mekas’s Film-Makers’ Cinematheque in New York. While the site could use updating, it contains info galore on the eighty shows that Foreman wrote and directed himself or staged by other authors; the films and videos he sporadically created; and the numerous books he published, including scripts, manifestos, essays, and one 1997 novel, No-body. The transcribed “notebooks” section of the site features more than fifty downloadable files of free-floating dialogue that he offered up for others to use in their own productions. Not enough? You should visit the Foreman page at the PennSound website, a virtual trove of performance documentation, interviews, readings, and even the sound loops from his 2001 show Now That Communism Is Dead My Life Feels Empty! Too much? You could simply skim Foreman’s bountiful Wikipedia page, given that I just corrected it. Someone had named the artist Kate Manheim—Foreman’s remarkable widow, who for many years was his star actress—as being his first wife. She was his second. The brilliant film critic Amy Taubin preceded her. Now you know!