C. Brandon Ogbunu in Undark Magazine:

Last month, I was fortunate to participate in an event hosted by Open to Debate, a one-hour weekly program broadcast on National Public Radio stations across the country, and the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University. The participants considered the question: “Is the scientific enterprise too risk-averse?”

The preparation I did for the event was nerve-wracking, mostly because it was my first time ever participating in a debate. But I enjoyed the experience. The debate functioned like an extended conversation between me and three others from varied backgrounds who had thought about the issues. We each had our area of focus, which led to a wide-ranging discussion. But the resonant aspect of the event was in how it forced me to carefully consider big questions about the health of science, which now operates in what I and others describe as wartime. In light of that, I reflected on why science feels so culturally intransigent, and why this frustrates me to the extent that it does. The exercise prompted me to think about whether scientific risk aversion is a problem at all, why that is so, and how we can address it.

More here.

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Nicholas Low at The Point:

In 2023, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen released a document called “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” in which he proclaimed himself a de facto spokesman of the “effective accelerationist” movement. E/acc, as it is known in online spheres, is billed as a rejoinder to effective altruism and has gained traction in recent years among Silicon Valley technologists and the new right. The fundamental idea of e/acc is that accelerating technological development is the best way to resolve most of our cultural problems. The policy corollary is that we should therefore deregulate the tech industry, especially with respect to AI, nuclear power and nanotechnology.

But Andreessen’s manifesto is not focused on policy. Rather, it is an expression of what we might call “superhumanist” discourse. By this I mean that his proclamations largely revolve around the idea that humankind already possesses the power to become superhuman, if only we could get around a thoroughly nihilistic establishment. In a section headed “The Enemy,” he writes, “Our enemy is deceleration, de-growth, depopulation—the nihilistic wish, so trendy among our elites, for fewer people, less energy, and more suffering and death.”

more here.

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Best Society

When I was a child, I thought,
Casually, that solitude
Never needed to be sought.
Something everybody had,
Like nakedness, it lay at hand,
Not specially right or specially wrong,
A plentiful and obvious thing
Not at all hard to understand.

Then, after twenty, it became
At once more difficult to get
And more desired – though all the same
More undesirable; for what
You are alone has, to achieve
The rank of fact, to be expressed
In terms of others, or it’s just
A compensating make-believe.

Much better stay in company!
To love you must have someone else,
Giving requires a legatee,
Good neighbors need whole parishfuls
Of folk to do it on – in short,
Our virtues are all social; if,
Deprived of solitude, you chafe,
It’s clear you’re not the virtuous sort.

Viciously, then, I lock my door.
The gas-fire breathes. The wind outside
Ushers in evening rain. Once more
Uncontradicting solitude
Supports me on its giant palm;
And like a sea-anemone
Or simple snail, there cautiously
Unfolds, emerges, what I am.

by Philip Larkin
from Poetic Outlaws

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Mario Vittone at his own website:

The new captain jumped from the deck, fully dressed, and sprinted through the water. A former lifeguard, he kept his eyes on his victim as he headed straight for the couple swimming between their anchored sportfisher and the beach. “I think he thinks you’re drowning,” the husband said to his wife. They had been splashing each other and she had screamed but now they were just standing, neck-deep on the sand bar. “We’re fine, what is he doing?” she asked, a little annoyed. “We’re fine!” the husband yelled, waving him off, but his captain kept swimming hard. ”Move!” he barked as he sprinted between the stunned owners. Directly behind them, not ten feet away, their nine-year-old daughter was drowning. Safely above the surface in the arms of the captain, she burst into tears, “Daddy!”

How did this captain know – from fifty feet away – what the father couldn’t recognize from just ten? Drowning is not the violent, splashing, call for help that most people expect. The captain was trained to recognize drowning by experts and years of experience. The father, on the other hand, had learned what drowning looks like by watching television.

More here.

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Adam Iscoe at the New York Times:

The joke among young men these days is that everybody’s got a little money riding on something: football games, foreign elections, the odds of a U.S. military strike. Except it’s not really a joke. I recently made $3.79 guessing when the United States would attack Tehran. I pocketed $0.85 when To Lam was re-elected general secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam. I took home $83.64 after the rock climber Alex Honnold successfully climbed the skyscraper Taipei 101 without a rope.

My wagers were all placed on a prediction market site called Polymarket. Polymarket is sort of like the Nasdaq or the New York Stock Exchange, except instead of buying and selling shares of publicly traded companies like Apple or Microsoft, the platform allows you to trade on what will happen in the future. Who will win the midterms? How much will the Fed cut rates next month? Will the government shut down? Well, it did — and I lost an entire month’s rent. That one really hurt.

More here.

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Lori Trahan at the Commonwealth Beacon:

Earlier this year, Anthropic unveiled Mythos, an AI model capable of identifying thousands of vulnerabilities across every major operating system and web browser. It was deemed too dangerous for public release, but that has not stopped competitors from racing to catch up, or our adversaries from trying to access it. The speed of AI development means Mythos represents a floor on what these systems can do. The models will only get more powerful, and the risks to America’s workers, national security, and cyber infrastructure will only grow.

Despite these flashing warning lights, there is no federal law on the books governing how the most powerful AI systems in the world are built, tested, or deployed. No independent auditors verify the safety claims of the largest AI companies, commonly referred to as “frontier” labs. No federal agency has clear authority to step in when something goes wrong. While some have argued there is still plenty of time for Congress to act, I would say, look around.

More here.

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Sana Goyal in The Guardian:

Three twentysomethings “drive and dream of an impossible night on an endless street. moving as a massive through mad sticky traffic, destination: where else? manchester, wilmslow road, the curry mile, yo!” Thus opens Sufiyaan Salam’s high-octane debut novel, written largely in gen Z lowercase – and you’re in for a ride.

The Boyz are British Pakistani friends in their early 20s. Immy is “something of a bad-boy muslim slut who don’t never text back”; Khan is “the mogul mowgli himself … the type to recite Warren Buffett epigrams like they’re hadiths”; and Haris has “a mind that never switches off, philosophy subreddits doing bares”. Each is looking for an escape – from their past, present, someone else, or themselves – and they come together for one night “cruising and bruising in a hire car towards what might just be the natural elastic endpoint of a friendship beginning to fray”.

More here.

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The Physics of Angels

I suspect the world remembers everything—
time and bone and words flung together
and me in it, suspecting. If we can believe
in photons—entities that possess movement
but not mass, and if the spirit, too
is made of light—then who am I to say
I haven’t lived before—or you,
and thus this tenderness?
Who am I to doubt that grace
is elemental, like fire—or that souls
have no need of us, finally?

by Trish Crapo
from Walk Though Paradise Backward
Slate Roof Publishing Collective, 2004
Northfield, MA.

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John McWhorter at the New York Times:

If you are of a certain age, notice how you are likely using exclamation points more lately. It has become a mark of agreeability in a way that would mystify a time traveler from as recently as a couple decades ago. “See you in a bit!” “I looked for you yesterday but you weren’t there!” I now email like that.

This is part of a long story Florence Hazrat tells in “On the Mark: From Periods to Interrobangs, How Punctuation Remade the World,” due out in August. Hazrat takes us from when writing had no punctuation at all, through when it was invented largely as a guide to reading out loud, to today’s proliferation of marks like hashtags and emojis.

It’s a roller coaster of a story. Ancient Greek had no spaces between words, Hazrat writes, and Aristophanes of Byzantium, a librarian in Alexandria, found it cumbersome. He came up with a three-dot system to indicate how long one was to pause in reciting the text: a dot at bottom, middle and top. Top was a full stop, what we know as a period. Bottom was a brief pause, as in “comma.” Middle was if you wanted something in between, a kind of “I’m OK but just wait a sec” — kind of a semicolon. I’d like it if we could go back to that.

More here.

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Chenoe Hart at Noema:

Human-only interfaces are already increasingly being used by both people and computers. But today’s interfaces are generally designed to assume a user in analog physical space is operating them. Skeuomorphic design reinforces this by representing a computer’s internal functions via physical metaphors. We access files via folders located on a desktop. Skeuomorphic graphics often proliferate during moments of technological change; embedding references to the past within the interfaces of new products can help with “easing the transition from the old to the new,” in the words of UX pioneer Don Norman. But skeuomorphism can also conceal a technology’s true nature: As the writer Clive Thompson advocated in a 2012 Wired article critiquing the early iPhone’s imitation paper and leather-stitched graphics, lingering on outdated metaphors could mean that “we’ll fail to produce digital tools that harness what computers do best.”

As today’s computers transition into being able to perceive our world, they appear to be seeing it through their own reverse skeuomorphic analogies. AI systems comprehend physical phenomena via existing computational metaphors.

More here.

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Nesrine Malik at The Guardian:

The first time I heard a song by Saint Levant, only three years ago, was in a world that does not exist any more. Gaza’s buildings were intact, as were its schools and roads and markets and mosques. My home city of Khartoum in Sudan was standing, as it had for centuries. Back then, I could scroll for fun, not in dread. I could stumble, say, in late 2022, upon an arresting clip on TikTok of a song by an Arab artist with a pun for a name; Saint Levant, a play on Saint Laurent – the icon of western style had been Arabised in homage to the Middle East’s Levant region.

I began to see the same song all over my social media. In the video, Saint Levant, then 22, is in a white vest and brown trousers. A gold pendant chain dangles on his chest, a tattoo encircles his left arm. He starts by rapping in English, telling the woman he is wooing that “he’s not toxic, he’s broken baby”. And then, the twist, as he switches to Arabic, then French, then English again. Like a wholesome boy next door, he tells her to send his regards to her grandmother and her brother. Then says that he wants to make her forget about her ex, he wants her overthinking all her texts, he wants the neighbours to hear her yell. “Lover boy Levant is back in the building,” he declared.

More here.

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Nicolás Medina Mora at The Nation:

So if Now I Surrender is neither a western nor an anti-western, then what is it? My answer is that it’s a counter-western: a narrative that answers the fictional history of North America not by inverting the polarity of its values, but by adopting an entirely different set of rules. It’s on this point that Enrigue’s status as a political philosopher becomes undeniable: Among many other things, his novel is an argument for a nondialectical approach to fundamental questions that understands that to reduce difference to negation is just another way to erase it. Geronimo was not merely non-Western: He was who he was. The tragedy for everyone involved, including Mexican and American colonizers, is that the insistence that he had to become either Mexican or American or else nothing at all robbed us all of what may well have been our last chance to pull the emergency brake on the locomotive of Western politics and halt its mad race toward disaster. The logical end point of the nation-state, after all, is often the concentration camp: the enclosure of exclusion to which societies so lacking in political imagination as to become convinced that they have no choice but to impose a way of life amenable to the unequal accumulation of capital banish their indocile subjects for no crime other than being different.

more here.

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Paula Span in The New York Times:

Jules Netherland traveled from her home in the Bronx to the New York State Capitol in Albany several times in the past few years, hoping to persuade the Legislature to pass a medical aid in dying bill, allowing terminally ill patients to end their lives with a lethal prescription. She spoke at rallies. With other members of the advocacy organization Compassion & Choices, she visited legislators’ offices. In 2024, as the State Assembly was debating the aid in dying bill, she helped unfurl a banner in the chamber gallery that read, “Stop the Suffering.”

Her activism was becoming difficult. Ms. Netherland, who is 59 and works for a nonprofit, was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2019. “I did a full year of aggressive treatment,” she said. “Chemotherapy. A mastectomy. Radiation treatment every weekday for five weeks. Six months of two oral medications.” She recovered and felt well until the cancer returned a few years later. Although metastatic breast cancer is incurable, drugs are keeping her disease at bay for now. Ms. Netherland feels fortunate but also fatigued, and she contends with brain fog, gastrointestinal symptoms and joint pain.

More here.

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Some Criticism, Some Theory,
……….Some Questions

He said,
“Too much plot, too little dancing.”

Plot would have us believe the world
is understandable. Not “The King
died, then the Queen, ” but
“The King died and the Queen
died of grief.”
……………….. We want cause
to break onto the future like
a great wave.
……………….. So, how is it you
woke up where you woke up this morning?
What was the cause and the cause
of that cause? Is your storyline believable?
And why isn’t there more dancing?

by Nils Peterson
from My Dinner With Nils
Kinchafoonee Press
Athens Georgia, 2025

Davide Castelvecchi in Nature:

In a scene that could have easily featured in an episode of the US television sitcom The Big Bang Theory, the late US physicist Richard Feynman once turned a visit to a Thai restaurant he often dined at into a mathematical riddle: how adventurous should we be in trying new dishes? Feynman promptly solved this on a sheet of paper. Now, behavioural scientists have revisited Feynman’s solution — some of which had been obscured by his inscrutable handwriting — and found that his was indeed the optimal strategy.

Feynman’s dilemma is one that will be familiar to any restaurant-goer. Do we keep ordering the best dish we’ve had so far, or do we explore the menu in the hope of finding something better? A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on 1 June probes this question, and includes experimental findings that participants adopt meal-choosing strategies that closely approximate Feynman’s mathematical solution¹.

More here.

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Griffin Oleynick at Commonweal:

At first glance, there is something cold and formal about the portrait. Raphael’s Saint Sebastian in Half-Length, painted around 1503, when the artist was nineteen, departs radically from traditional iconography of the saint. Gone is the dramatic tension, gone are the visual pleasures that made paintings of Sebastian so popular during the Renaissance: no muscly torso pierced with arrows, no wide-eyed gaze directed skyward, no mouth agape in pain or ecstasy.

Instead we find a tight-lipped, androgynous youth, a gold chain draped over his embroidered blue velvet frock and red cloak. Behind him, forested green hills roll into misty blue mountains. Sebastian, head slightly tilted, eyes half-lidded, is peaceful but aloof. The arrow shaft resting in his right hand seems less a weapon than a pen or paintbrush, further abstracting him from his martyrdom and all its gory, human details.

But look again, and you’ll find warmth.

more here.

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