Chris Niebauer at IAI:

For most ordinary people, it is assumed that “we” exist somewhere within the skull, and this self is free to make decisions. This self is the “captain” of the body, controlling our behaviors and making our life choices. The problem is that neither this inner self nor free will exists the way most think that it does. Research conclusively demonstrates that these are just stories that we humans make up. Michael Gazzaniga’s groundbreaking research eventually concludes that the self is just a fiction created by the brain. Humans make up such stories, believe in them, and rarely question their validity. However, this isn’t the bad news it may appear to be. It is good news, but it will take a while to grasp.

More here.

George Blaustein in the European Review of Books:

Before pondering the locations of action cinema (and thus the vectors of our own nostalgias and aspirations), let us briefly rehearse the mystique of Tom Cruise’s action-hero Method-acting, and its storied relationship to cinema as art and industry.

The plot of Dead Reckoning (Part One) revolves around a fancy cruciform key that looks both antique and futuristic. It has two parts; when they’re locked fancily together, four jewel-like lights on the key’s bow glow, giving the key a Benjaminian aura of Unreproduzierbarkeit. Our protagonists have one part of the key; they need the other part. The key, we’re told, unlocks the as-yet-unrevealed device that will allow humanity to control or destroy an ominous artificial intelligence.

The AI — self-aware, rogue, malevolent — is Dead Reckoning (Part One)’s disembodied, inscrutably brilliant villain.

More here.

Bruno Maçães in Time:

Palantir’s founding team, led by investor Peter Thiel and Alex Karp, wanted to create a company capable of using new data integration and data analytics technology — some of it developed to fight online payments fraud — to solve problems of law enforcement, national security, military tactics, and warfare. They called it Palantir, after the magical stones in The Lord of the Rings. Palantir, founded in 2003, developed its tools fighting terrorism after September 11, and has done extensive work for government agencies and corporations though much of its work is secret. It went public in 2020. But through its 20 years in business, the question has been just how capable are its systems and what could it achieve on a large scale conflict. Can it deliver in a war between large armies and with greater firepower?

More here.

Gloria Dickie at Lapham’s Quarterly:

There is an old temple at Chavín de Huántar. The archaeological site lies halfway between Peru’s tropical lowlands and the coast, near the confluence of the Mosna and Huanchesca Rivers, tucked between jagged mountain cordilleras. Inside the temple, a U-​shaped flat-​topped pyramid, intricate carvings of animals exotic to the highlands cover the stone passageways that form a labyrinth between chambers. Jaguars. Harpy eagles. Caimans. Anacondas. Devotees once came here to consult oracles and perform bloodletting rituals. In the middle of the central cruciform room, illuminated by a beam of sunlight, stands a fifteen-​foot-​tall, triangular granite monolith that connects the floor to the ceiling. A figure has been etched into the rock. Googly eyes sit above a broad snout with round nostrils. Curly hair ending in snake heads, like Medusa, frames a snarling face. One hand is raised in the air, palm forward, as if permitting passage to another world. The other lays down at its side. Five curving claws protrude from its feet, where worshippers once laid lavish gifts of food and ceramics. This is El Lanzón.

more here.

Alan Yuhas at the New York Times:

Armed with machetes and chain-saws, hacking through fallen trees and wading through dense scrub, the archaeologists cleared a path down rocky trails.

At last, they reached their destination in Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula: a hidden city where pyramids and palaces rose above crowds over 1,000 years ago, with a ball court and terraces now buried and overgrown.

Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History hailed their work late last month, saying they had discovered an ancient Maya city in “a vast area practically unknown to archaeology.” “These stories about ‘lost cities in the jungle’ — very often these things are quite minor or being spun by journalists,” said Simon Martin, a political anthropologist who was not involved in the work. “But this is much closer to the real deal.”

more here.

Barbara Spindel in The Christian Science Monitor:

One can’t help but feel a sense of wonder reading about the bar-tailed godwit, a bird the size of a football, whose winter migration can take it from Alaska to New Zealand in one marathon flight across the Pacific Ocean. The ornithologists who’ve helped us understand the phenomenon of migration inspire wonder as well. Their ingenuity and zeal are at the heart of Rebecca Heisman’s delightful debut, “Flight Paths: How a Passionate and Quirky Group of Pioneering Scientists Solved the Mystery of Bird Migration.”

Heisman, a science writer who spent five years working for the American Ornithological Society, begins with an overview of the seasonal movement of birds. Some don’t migrate at all, while others are categorized as either short-, medium-, or long-distance travelers. “Flight Paths” focuses on the latter, birds that, once the urge to migrate is triggered, travel for improbably extended stretches, “chasing booms in the availability of insects and other key foods and the right conditions to nest and raise babies.”

More here.

Heidi Ledford in Nature:

Detailed maps of the cells in human organs show how the placenta commandeers the maternal blood supply, how kidney cells transition from healthy to diseased states and how cells in the intestine organize themselves into distinct neighbourhoods. These atlases, published on 19 July in Nature^1–3, are examples of a powerful and increasingly popular approach to studying the organs of the body in both health and disease. Each comprises hundreds of thousands of data points about gene activity and protein production in individual cells, which are then mapped to their specific location in the organ.

The hope is that the atlases will eventually yield clues about how to diagnose and treat disorders that can arise when those cells become injured or dysfunctional. “These cells organize themselves into neighbourhoods, towns, countries,” says Michael Snyder, a geneticist at Stanford University in California and an author of the study looking at the intestine³. “And it affects their function.”

Cell atlases

Technologies that allow researchers to monitor gene activity in individual cells have helped to spur the production of many cell atlases in recent years, including maps of blood vessels in the brain⁴ and of various types of tumour⁵–⁷. With time, these technologies have become more sophisticated, allowing researchers to incorporate information about a cell’s location and interrogate gene activity more thoroughly. The latest papers take this further by evaluating the abundance of dozens of proteins in each cell. The research is part of a consortium called the Human Biomolecular Atlas Program (HuBMAP), which is funded by the US National Institutes of Health and aims to develop tools to map out the cells of the human body.

More here.

Digging

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging, I look down

Till his straining rump among the flower beds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug; the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked,
Loving the cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade
Just like his old man.

My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner’s bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away.

Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mold, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests
I’ll dig with it.

by Seamus Heaney
from Death of a Naturalist
Faber and Faber, 1966

Tobias Rose-Stockwell at Literary Hub:

For the first time, the majority of information we consume as a species is controlled by algorithms built to capture our emotional attention. As a result, we hear more angry voices shouting fearful opinions and we see more threats and frightening news simply because these are the stories most likely to engage us. This engagement is profitable for everyone involved: producers, journalists, creators, politicians, and, of course, the platforms themselves.

The machinery of social media has become a lens through which society views itself—it is fundamentally changing the rules of human discourse. We’ve all learned to play this game with our own posts and content, earning our own payments in minute rushes of dopamine, and small metrics of acclaim. As a result, our words are suddenly soaked in righteousness, certainty, and extreme judgment.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

The Earth’s atmosphere is good for some things, like providing something to breathe. But it does get in the way of astronomers, who have been successful at launching orbiting telescopes into space. But gravity and the ground are also useful for certain things, like walking around. The Moon, fortunately, provides gravity and a solid surface without any complications of a thick atmosphere — perfect for astronomical instruments. Building telescopes and other kinds of scientific instruments on the Moon is an expensive and risky endeavor, but the time may have finally arrived. I talk with astrophysicist Joseph Silk about the case for doing astronomy from the Moon, and what special challenges and opportunities are involved.

More here.

Francisco Toro in Persuasion:

Imagine the entire cohort of U.S. graduating high school students this year as a group of one thousand bright-eyed 18-year-olds: kids of every class and race, spanning the whole spectrum of talent, wealth and oppression. What should the goal of progressive politics be for them? Where should attention be focused?

Let’s look at our thousand more closely. 380 of them—overwhelmingly poorer and disproportionately black, Latino, and male—will stop their school careers here. They’ll go directly into the workforce, where they’ll earn less and live worse than most of the rest of the group.

Another 190 of our original thousand will enroll in a two-year college. Just 55 of them will actually complete a two-year degree within six years. The other 135 will fail to get any qualification, and they will be at a particular disadvantage in the workforce.

You might think the left would focus their energy like a laser beam on the 570 out of every thousand graduating seniors who never enroll in a 4-year university in the first place. Racial minorities dominate this group, and their socio-economic results are terrible. If you’re actually concerned about social and racial justice, this is where you need to look.

More here.

Michael Dango at Artforum:

The Neo-Concrete movement was famously short-lived, essentially moribund within a couple of years of the manifesto’s publication. When a US-backed coup deposed Brazil’s leftist president in 1964 and installed a military dictatorship that lasted twenty-one years, Lygia Clark, Ferreira Gullar, and other artists central to the movement fled. Pape remained. Among her peers, Pape always stood out for being left behind. During the Neo-Concrete years, she devoted herself to a seemingly passé medium with which she’d been engaged since the early 1950s: the woodblock. Newspapers singled her out, often simply calling her the gravadora, or printmaker. Pape would later theorize these works as the basis for her whole oeuvre, which came to span film, installation, and participatory performance. As the art historian Adele Nelson explains in her book Forming Abstraction: Art and Institutions in Postwar Brazil (2022), Pape “conceived printmaking as a conceptual foundation for her artistic practice. . . . She refused to view her early prints as mere preludes to participatory works of art” and instead proposed that “prints—that is, stationary works of art—can activate an experiential, phenomenological experience for the viewer.”

more here.

Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian:

One by one, the toxic giants have come crashing to earth. In the last month or so Boris Johnson has quit, Donald Trump has been arraigned on felony charges, Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi has died, and even Vladimir Putin looks significantly weaker than he did. It’s sorely tempting to conclude that the chaotic ride of recent years is finally over, and life might return to something more like normal.

But that, according to Ferdinand Mount’s absorbing tour of populist rogues through the ages, would be a rookie mistake. It may be comforting to think of so-called Caesars – a type of leader defined by what Mount calls his (and it’s mostly, though not invariably, his) “relentless egotism, his lack of scruple, his thoughtless brutality, his cheesy glitz” and above all his loathing of democratic checks and balances – as freakish aberrations from a generally orderly norm. But trace the line from ancient Rome to Oliver Cromwell, from Napoleon Bonaparte to modern-day strongmen, and it becomes obvious that they are a regularly recurring phenomenon for which nations just as regularly fall, and from which they don’t recover overnight. “These ill-starred comets,” Mount writes, “leave a long trail of debris.” But they also have something to teach us about stopping the next Caesar early.

More here.

Jack Nevins at The Paris Review:

Things get especially interesting every weekend night about two and a half hours into the show, when Swift diverges from her otherwise precisely orchestrated set to perform two “surprise songs” from her catalog acoustically, never to be repeated at a later show, or so she says. The number of viewers in the live streams increase threefold, and fans on TikTok broadcast their feral reactions to Swift’s choices, which become ripe for close reading. “If I hear ‘friends break up’ I’m gonna kill myself,” one user watching the Cincinnati show declares, referencing the first line of the song “right where you left me.” Swift plays the opening chords of “Call It What You Want” instead. “Shut the fuck up,” our Swiftie replies, vaulting herself off the couch like an eel out of water. “Not ‘Call It What You Want’!”

Before the Philadelphia show, fans had been speculating that Swift might play “gold rush,” a song that mentions an Eagles T-shirt, or “seven,” which invokes her Pennsylvania childhood. Meanwhile, I’d just won $629 on FanDuel placing a four-leg parlay on a New York Knicks game, and the idea of siphoning my winnings away from rent or clothes or utilities and into an Eras Tour fund seemed both fiscally and sentimentally appealing, an exchange between two of my principal enthusiasms: sports and Taylor Swift.

more here.