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Jacob Mchangama in The Conversation:

For much of the 20th century, young Americans were seen as free speech’s fiercest defenders. But now, young Americans are growing more skeptical of free speech.

According to a March 2025 report by The Future of Free Speech, a nonpartisan think tank where I am executive director, support among 18- to 34-year-olds for allowing controversial or offensive speech has dropped sharply in recent years.

In 2021, 71% of young Americans said people should be allowed to insult the U.S. flag, which is a key indicator of support for free speech, no matter how distasteful. By 2024, that number had fallen to just 43% – a 28-point drop. Support for pro‑LGBTQ+ speech declined by 20 percentage points, and tolerance for speech that offends religious beliefs fell by 14 points.

This drop contributed to the U.S. having the third-largest decline in free speech support among the 33 countries that The Future of Free Speech surveyed – behind only Japan and Israel.

Why has this support diminished so dramatically?

More here.

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Eric Topol in Time Magazine:

Meet my patient Mrs. L. R. She’s 98 years young and has never suffered a day of serious illness in her long life. She was referred to me by her primary care physician to assess her heart condition because she had developed swelling in her legs, known as edema. When we first met in the clinic, I noted there was no accompanying family member, so I asked how she got to the medical center. She’d driven herself. I soon learned much more about this exceptionally vibrant, healthy lady who lives alone, has an extensive social network, and enjoys her solitude.

Her remarkable health span isn’t shared by her family members. Her mother died at 59; her father at 64. Her two brothers died at 43 and 75. Three years prior to our meeting, her husband had died at 97. He had also been quite healthy, with a similar health span profile in contrast to his parents and siblings, who all had chronic diseases and died decades younger. Following her husband’s death, Mrs. L. R. got depressed and dropped 30 pounds. She lost her interest in her hobbies of painting and doing 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzles. She did continue to play cards and Rummikub every week with a circle of eight women. One of these friends suggested she move from the house she’d lived in for decades to a senior residence apartment. The move led her to artists, new friends, and an extended social network. This all brought her back to her “old” self, fully restoring her life’s passions and getting back to a healthy weight.

More here.

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Emily Anthes in The New York Times:

It was a cold, gray afternoon in December, and at the American Museum of Natural History, a half million leaf-cutter ants were hunkered down in their homes. The ants typically spend their days harvesting slivers of leaves, which they use to grow expansive fungal gardens that serve as both food and shelter. On many days, visitors to the museum’s insectarium can watch an endless river of ants transporting leaf fragments from the foraging area to the fungus-filled glass orbs where they live.

It was hard to blame them. It was a biting, blustery day — and the end of a long, eventful year for the colony. The tropical ants, which had been harvested in Trinidad and nurtured in Oregon, had never set foot in New York City before last December, arriving like 500,000 insect ingénues. It took time for the ants to find their footing and for museum employees to learn how to create a happy home for them.

More here.

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Nicola Jones in Knowable Magazine:

What is the history of bureaucracies? Where did the concept originate, and how has it evolved?

It’s always been true that ideas and policies don’t execute themselves. You need a bureaucracy, a group of servants, to do that for you. That is true for nation states, and also for companies and universities.

The major leap in the evolution of bureaucracy, to a place that is not corrupt, happens when the people appointed to it aren’t friends or family or political cronies who can pay for their position, but people who are selected for their expertise, meritocratically. If you go back more than a thousand years, China is one of the first places where we see the development of a really important bureaucracy with entrance exams. It was very serious if you were caught cheating — the punishment could be death. We know from ample literature that corruption is lower where you have meritocratically recruited civil servants.

More here.

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Robin Givhan in The Washington Post:

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Sacrifice

he was still
wet
her Hindu
amniotic fluid
on his new
Pakistani body.

two days or
two kilometers that way
he would have been Indian
but the border had been drawn

by white hands
and swords had been drawn
by brown ones.
either way, he was
and now, wasn’t.

she called him Yousuf—
the name my Muslim grandfather
would have given him

pulled out his tiny body
from between her legs
stumbled into the darkness
far away from the camps

dug a hole with bare hands
and placed him in his cradle.
the next night, wolves
looted the earth.

by Ain Kahn 
from Rattle Magazine

Author’s note:
 “I grew up with stories of the Partition of India, and the trauma and heartbreak it inflicted upon millions, including both sets of my grandparents. I am struck by the continued sacrifices and loss of lives required to uphold the identities of these two nations, which share so many social, cultural, linguistic and artistic commonalities, because they were at one point, one.

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Jeannette Cooperman at The Common Reader:

A pandemic is never only about biological contagion. Much of what we feel, think, and do—far more than I want to admit—is the product of what we perceive or unconsciously mimic in the world around us. Laughter is contagious, and yawns—even chimpanzees find yawns contagious. I realize only now, in the enforced quiet, how I absorbed the pace and values of the society around me. My mind was quiet, if concerned, as I watched the infectiousness of fear, panic, and hysteria; of rationalization or mystification; of courage. Ideas and beliefs, good information and bad information, enthusiasm and advice and funny memes spread as fast as the virus.

All of that is contagion.

More here.

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Elizabeth Gibney in Nature:

The system, called AlphaEvolve, combines the creativity of a large language model (LLM) with algorithms that can scrutinize the model’s suggestions to filter and improve solutions. It was described in a white paper released by the company on 14 May.

“The paper is quite spectacular,” says Mario Krenn, who leads the Artificial Scientist Lab at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light in Erlangen, Germany. “I think AlphaEvolve is the first successful demonstration of new discoveries based on general-purpose LLMs.”

As well as using the system to discover solutions to open maths problems, DeepMind has already applied the artificial intelligence (AI) technique to its own practical challenges, says Pushmeet Kohli, head of science at the firm in London.

AlphaEvolve has helped to improve the design of the company’s next generation of tensor processing units — computing chips developed specially for AI — and has found a way to more efficiently exploit Google’s worldwide computing capacity, saving 0.7% of total resources. “It has had substantial impact,” says Kohli.

More here.

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Oliver Eagleton at The Ideas Letter:

One of the most intriguing ways of conceptualizing the scorched landscape of the 2020s is the theory of ‘hyperpolitics’, advanced by the Belgian political philosopher Anton Jäger. Our current predicament, he writes, is one of “extreme politicization without political consequences.” While ideological commitment is ubiquitous, institutional outlets for it are absent. While contestation is fierce, the form it takes is frustratingly ephemeral. Politics is at once everywhere and nowhere – permeating our everyday lives but failing to influence state policy, which continues on much the same neoliberal trajectory, with minor variations here and there.

More here.

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Erin O’Donnell in Harvard Magazine:

London cabbies are famous for knowing their way around their city’s maze of streets. To obtain a taxi license in London, drivers must pass a legendary test requiring them to memorize the names and locations of 25,000 streets, as well as landmarks and businesses. Passing the exam demands years of intensive study.

This knowledge appears to affect the drivers’ brains, enlarging the hippocampus, an area responsible for spatial memory and navigation. According to a small brain-imaging study published in 2000, London cab drivers had unusually large hippocampi. This part of the brain also happens to degrade in people with Alzheimer’s disease. With those findings in mind, four Harvard researchers recently conducted a new study, published in the BMJ (formerly known as the British Medical Journal), which explored rates of Alzheimer’s-related deaths among almost nine million people across 443 different occupations between 2020 and 2022.

“The two occupations with the lowest Alzheimer’s mortality are ambulance drivers and taxi drivers, jobs that very heavily use the hippocampus as a function of their everyday work,” explains Newhouse professor of healthcare policy Anupam Jena. He and his colleagues were startled by the strength of their results: ambulance drivers and taxi drivers were less than half as likely to die of Alzheimer’s disease than the general population.

More here.

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Alex Shephard in The Washington Post:

In April 2024, Favreau visited the White House with his podcast co-hosts and several other “influencers” at a meet-and-greet the night before the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. Biden was incoherent and frail; he kept telling stories that no one could understand. Sixteen months had passed, but he seemed to have aged a half-century. An alarmed Favreau approached a White House aide, but his concerns were brushed off. The president was just tired, he was told. It was the end of a long week. There was no reason for concern. Two months later, Biden delivered the single worst performance in the 60-year history of televised presidential debates, dooming his reelection campaign, destroying his presidency and essentially delivering the country to Donald Trump.

Favreau’s experience was hardly unique. Far from it. “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again,” CNN anchor Jake Tapper and Axios reporter Alex Thompson’s account of Biden’s marked deterioration throughout his presidency, is littered with similar anecdotes.

More here.

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At the Top of Das Flores

the tropical sun
wind-blowing though trees and ferns
water-golden, rushing to the waterfall
rocks-around, under, over everything
the sound of cascading water
butterflies of every color
my love sitting next to me

fire  air  earth  water
music  art  love

I am full
I am complete
I am at peace

by Robert Markey
from Poems from Brazil, 2007

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Ian Kumekawa at Literary Hub:

On a spring day in 1989, a container ship arrived in New York harbor from Eemshaven, a deepwater port in the Netherlands. The Vessel, named the Bibby Resolution, belonged to a well-established Liverpool shipping line, one whose founder had invested in the Atlantic slave trade two hundred years before. But while the company that owned it had a history that went back centuries, the ship itself was unmistakably a product of the late twentieth century.

The Vessel was assembled out of standardized parts developed for streamlining oceanic trade. It was a global polyglot: manufactured in Sweden, it had a British owner and an international crew. In the decade since its launch, it had been registered in four different countries. At the time it moored in New York, the Vessel was listed in the Bahamas, though it had never physically been close to Bahamian waters. Like other container ships, the Bibby Resolution was a creature not so much of a single country but of a global economic order.

The Bibby Resolution was an unusual container ship.

More here.

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Carlo Rovelli in Nature:

Nature seems to have played us for a fool in the past few decades. Much theoretical research in fundamental physics during this time has focused on the search ‘beyond’ our best theories: beyond the standard model of particle physics, beyond the general theory of relativity, beyond quantum theory. But an epochal sequence of experimental results has proved many such speculations unfounded, and confirmed physics that I learnt at school half a century ago. I think physicists are failing to heed the lessons — and that, in turn, is hindering progress in physics.

Take the 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson using the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, Europe’s particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland. Peter Higgs and François Englert, two of the theorists who had established the underlying theory almost 50 years earlier, shared the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics for this feat. The Higgs boson was the last particle of the standard model of particle physics to be discovered, and spectacularly confirmed that model, rather than the dozens of theories beyond it. Meanwhile, the apparent absence of evidence for ‘supersymmetric’ particles in LHC data has disappointed a generation of theoretical physicists who had bet on such particles existing, motivated by speculative theories, including string theory.

More here.

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David Wallace-Wells in the New York Times:

Established in 2000 — when Melinda French Gates was just 35 and Bill Gates was 44 and the world’s richest man — the foundation quickly became one of the most consequential philanthropies the world has ever seen, utterly reshaping the landscape of global public health, pouring more than $100 billion into causes starved for resources and helping save tens of millions of lives.

For all its pragmatic public-health spade work, the foundation has also served as a kind of valorous abstraction — the seeming embodiment of “the Golden Rule,” in a phrase that Bill Gates likes to use, and the face of an increasingly anachronistic era of elite optimism.

“You could say this announcement is not very timely,” Gates says, but the timeline isn’t short: He is committing the foundation to 20 more years of generous aid, more than $200 billion in total, targeting health and human development. And it comes laced with familiar humanitarian confidence, as Gates and his team now believe that their central goals can be achieved in much shorter time. But it is also disconcertingly definitive: The foundation will close its doors, permanently, on Dec. 31, 2045, at least several decades before originally intended. In the meantime, it will be spending down its endowment, as well as almost all of Gates’s remaining personal fortune.

More here.

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Frances Wilson in Literary Review:

Poets tend not to enjoy parties. W H Auden recalled that when T S Eliot was asked at a party if he was having fun, he replied, ‘Yes, if you see the essential horror of it all.’ ‘My wife and I have asked a crowd of craps/To come and waste their time and ours,’ writes Warlock-Williams in Philip Larkin’s ‘Vers de Société’. ‘Perhaps/You’d care to join us?’ ‘In a pig’s arse, friend,’ the speaker thinks. Why waste an evening holding a glass of ‘washing sherry’, catching ‘the drivel of some bitch/Who’s read nothing but Which’ and ‘Asking that ass about his fool research’? Small talk is usually the problem. Auden, in ‘At the Party’, moans how ‘Unrhymed, unrhythmical, the chatter goes:/Yet no one hears his own remarks as prose.’

Party talk makes for good social comedy. Tom Rachman’s story collection Basket of Deplorables begins with an election party hosted by Democrats in Manhattan in 2016. ‘What I don’t get about chiropractors, osteopaths and physios is how they interface, you know?’ opines one guest. ‘If I may mansplain…’ another interjects. ‘Social media’, a third is heard to say, ‘is taking ownership of the self.’ ‘Definitely an interesting narrative to unpack,’ responds a professor of cultural theory. ‘If it’s all the same to you,’ thinks Georgie, the hostess, ‘I’d rather just scream.’

More here.

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