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Aaron Benanav in The New York Times:

The world is a mess.

As President Trump upends global trade through a punitive suite of tariffs and redraws America’s alliances, world leaders are scrambling to respond. They are badly placed to deal with such disruption: Across the world, governments have been losing elections — or barely holding on — in the face of rising discontent. From the United States to Uruguay, Britain to India, an anti-incumbent wave swept through democracies in 2024. But not only democracies are in crisis. China, too, is grappling with social unrest and economic instability. Strife, these days, is global.

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Shelly Fan in Singularity Hub:

Scientists just unveiled the world’s tiniest pacemaker. Smaller than a grain of rice and controlled by light shone through the skin, the pacemaker generates power and squeezes the heart’s muscles after injection through a stint. The device showed it could steadily orchestrate healthy heart rhythms in rat, dog, and human hearts in a newly published study. It’s also biocompatible and eventually broken down by the body after temporary use. Over 23 times smaller than previous bioabsorbable pacemakers, the device opens the door to minimally invasive implants that wirelessly monitor heart health after extensive surgery or other heart problems.

“The extremely small sizes of these devices enable minimally invasive implantation,” the authors, led by John Rogers at Northwestern University, wrote. Paired with a wireless controller on the skin’s surface, the system automatically detected irregular heartbeats and targeted electrical zaps to different regions of the heart.

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Laurie Stone at The Paris Review:

Yesterday on Warren Street, Richard and I bumped into our friend Jake. If you are recognized on Warren Street, it answers many questions for the rest of the day. I said to Jake, “I love you.” I said, “Richard and I both love you.” Jake owns a shop and sees you in the way Godot would see you if he ever showed up. No one on Warren Street is waiting for Godot. If anything, we are waiting for Godot to leave. Jake said he had bottles of scented oil and he would give me some. It’s one of those offers  You have to weigh to yourself, if you are going to remind him. People can be more generous than they bargain for.

When Richard and I continued walking, he remarked that The Pitt, the doctor show we’ve been watching, is a morality tale, where we’re instructed about how to act in the face of death as well as life. It explained why it’s so much more fun to rewatch The Americans, where there is no possibility of moral certitude. At the end of the series, the FBI agent Stan allows Phillip and Elizabeth, who are spies and assassins, to escape back to Russia.

more here.

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David Austin Walsh in Boston Review:

“A moment of reckoning has arrived for the West.”

So say Alexander Karp and Nicholas Zamiska, top executives at Palantir Technologies—the multibillion-dollar software giant and defense contractor—in the preface to their recent book, The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West. But their reasons aren’t the ones you probably have in mind: the return of Trump, spiraling authoritarianism, the embarrassment of the liberal international order in failing to stop Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza (partly powered, as it happens, by Palantir’s services). No: the crux of the problem is that “Silicon Valley has lost its way.” Again, not for the reasons you might think—grossly concentrated power, violations of privacy, and AI at any cost, including a habitable planet. Instead, the authors say, Big Tech has sold out to consumer capitalism, forsaking the ambition and purpose it had when it got its start in the Cold War. Our “engineering elite,” Karp and Zamiska urge, have “an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation and the articulation of a national project.”

So they set out to articulate just such a project. They call it a “technological republic,” but what exactly this comes to they never quite say. What is clear is that words like “democracy” and “social contract” have little to do with it. Their patriotism flows from a different national tradition: war. Invoking the legacy of the Manhattan Project, they argue that technology companies can find their way back to meaning by embracing military applications of AI and working closely with the Pentagon to ensure continued geopolitical dominance in the “software century.” In other words, by doing exactly what would pad Palantir’s bottom line.

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Joshua Craze in Sidecar:

The 15 April marked the two-year anniversary of a civil war in Sudan that has left tens of thousands dead and millions displaced. I published an essay in Sidecar, ‘Gunshots in Khartoum’, two days after the war began, which tried to trace its emergent lineaments. The conflict initially pitted the Sudanese army against the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) – a paramilitary organization formed during the reign of dictator Omar al Bashir (1989-2019). In the war’s first weeks, the RSF overran much of Khartoum, Sudan’s capital, including the Presidential Palace. Initially constructed in 1825, during the Turkish-Egyptian colonisation of Sudan, the palace was the headquarters of an imperial regime intent on enslaving and plundering the rest of the country. The last governor of Turco-Egyptian Sudan (1820-1885), Charles Gordon, was killed by Mahdist insurgents on the steps of the palace in 1885. Successive regimes would retain both the exploitative tendencies of the Turco-Egyptian colonialists, and their obsession with the Presidential Palace. After the Mahdists demolished it, the British rebuilt it during their colonial occupation of Sudan (1898-1955). It became the ‘Republican Palace’ after Sudanese independence in 1956, and then – albeit briefly – the ‘People’s Palace’ during the reign of Jafaar Nimeiri (1969-1985). Bashir, who took power in a coup in 1989, ordered the construction of a new palace, next to the old one, built and funded by the Chinese. He didn’t get to stay long in his new abode. A wave of protests in 2018-19, triggered by cuts to grain and fuel subsidies, ended his regime.

A transitional government was established in 2019, which saw civilian politicians uncomfortably share power with the leaders of Sudan’s security services: Abdul Fattah Al Burhan, the chief of the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), was made the head of a Sovereign Council, while Mohamed Hamdan Daglo (also known as Hemedti), the RSF’s leader, became his deputy. The two men soon conspired to push the civilians out of power.

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Richard Kozul-Wright and Kevin Gallagher in Phenomenal World:

The “rules-based order” is more a confessional community of ardent believers in the benign global influence of American economic and political power than an accurate description of global governance. This is not widely understood. The more common story is that—per, to take a recent example, Paul Krugman—after the Second World War, Pax Americana “chose not to rig the system in its favor,” and instead cultivated a new model of hegemonic governance based on decency, benevolence, and restraint.

Donald Trump’s ascendancy to the White House through the murkier worlds of mega real estate deals and reality television means he has never had much time for such values—nor for the internationalist trappings typical of more vaunted members of “the order.” That unique personal history is beginning to hit home.

A flurry of Presidential decrees since January 17 has taken direct aim at key institutions of international cooperation, both domestic and multilateral. More are expected. There is certainly malice in these actions, and perhaps a little madness. But they embody an underlying belief in the restorative power and technological acumen of American business to make the country great again—and a determination to ensure that it is not obstructed by countervailing forces at home or abroad.

More here.

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Fiona Sturges in The Guardian:

In this novella from the three times Booker-shortlisted Anita Desai, a young Indian woman named Bonita is accosted by a chatty stranger who says she recognises her as the daughter of Rosarita, a dear friend she knew years ago at art school in Mexico. Bonita, a language student in San Miguel de Allende, is irritated by the woman and tells her she must be mistaken: “I don’t paint. Nor did my mother.” But then she remembers an old painting that hung in her childhood bedroom depicting a woman seated on a park bench rendered “in wishy-washy pastels”. In the picture there is a child playing in the sand at the woman’s feet. Although they are mother and child, it’s as if they have “no relation to each other, each absorbed in a separate world, and silent”.

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Jonathan Farmer at Slate:

For 23 years, A.O. Scott was a film critic for the New York Times. For the past five months, he has been the nation’s most prominent poetry critic, writing a monthly column that uses the Times’ interactive technology to analyze a single poem at a time. Scott isn’t coming to poetry as a true outsider. He finished all the coursework and exams for a Ph.D. in literature, and he was a literary critic before he started writing about movies. But when most writing about poetry is done by poets and lifelong academics, many of whom seem to view other poets and academics as their primary audience, that still makes Scott an unusual and welcome presence.

Scott’s columns on such poets as Gwendolyn Brooks, Philip Larkin, and Diane Seuss are inviting, approachable, playful, and smart. He’s a perceptive reader, and he has a knack for writing about poems in ways that lend shape and even excitement to the act of reading and thinking about them. He’s also comfortable ignoring some of the orthodoxies that too often obscure what it’s actually like to read a poem. Scott and I met over Zoom to talk about what poems are actually for, why many sophisticated readers fear poetry, and why I’m wrong to think a couple of em dashes cannot be a hug.

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Joseph Howlett in Quanta:

Her lens is category theory, a way of stepping back from the specifics of any individual field in favor of a broader underlying framework that bridges all of them. By thinking of language as a mathematical category, she’s been able to apply established tools to study it and glean new insights.

Linguists hope her model can help them to prove certain theories about how grammar and meaning emerge from strings of words, and to identify how AI-generated text differs from human language. Bradley herself is more interested in how studying language in this way might allow her to develop new mathematical tools.

Quanta spoke with Bradley about how mathematics can inform the study of language and vice versa.

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David Brooks in The New York Times:

In the beginning there was agony. Under the empires of old, the strong did what they willed and the weak suffered what they must. But over the centuries, people built the sinews of civilization: Constitutions to restrain power, international alliances to promote peace, legal systems to peacefully settle disputes, scientific institutions to cure disease, news outlets to advance public understanding, charitable organizations to ease suffering, businesses to build wealth and spread prosperity, and universities to preserve, transmit and advance the glories of our way of life. These institutions make our lives sweet, loving and creative, rather than nasty, brutish and short.

Trumpism is threatening all of that. It is primarily about the acquisition of power — power for its own sake. It is a multifront assault to make the earth a playground for ruthless men, so of course any institutions that might restrain power must be weakened or destroyed. Trumpism is about ego, appetite and acquisitiveness and is driven by a primal aversion to the higher elements of the human spirit — learning, compassion, scientific wonder, the pursuit of justice.

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Dannagal G. Young and Kevin Arceneaux in The Conversation:

When political psychologists introduced this concept of “need for chaos” in 2021, they described it not as a psychological trait, but as a character adaptation that occurs when some people experience a cultural and political situation that makes them feel like they are losing status and power. For some people, this feeling triggers a desire to “burn it all down” – “it” being society, institutions, the world – maybe to rebuild it all anew, or maybe just to see it all destroyed.

Only a small percentage of the U.S. population – less than 15% – tends to score high in need for chaos. But even so, understanding this minority is important to gaining insight into this political moment.

For example, people who score high in need for chaos exhibit greater support for political violence and a willingness to knowingly share hostile and false information online. And in our data, those higher in need for chaos report holding more trust in Musk, DOGE and Trump than people who score lower in the need for chaos measure.

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