Silent sirens, flashing for us all

Jack Clark at Import AI:

I walk around the town in which I live and there aren’t drones in the sky or self-driving cars or sidewalk robots or anything like that. And when I spend time on the internet, aimlessly scrolling social media sites in the dead of night as I attempt to extract a burp from my newborn, I might occasionally see some synthetic images or video, but mostly I see what has always been on these feeds: pictures of people I do and don’t know, memes, and a mixture of news and jokes.

And yet you and I both know there are great changes afoot. Huge new beasts lumbering from some unknown future into our present, dragging with them change.

I saw one of these beasts recently – during a recent moment when the time stars aligned (my wife, toddler, and baby were all asleep at the same time!) I fired up Claude Code with Opus 4.5 and got it to build a predator-prey species simulation with an inbuilt procedural world generator and nice features like A* search for pathfinding – and it one-shot it, producing in about 5 minutes something which I know took me several weeks to build a decade ago when I was teaching myself some basic programming, and which I think would take most seasoned hobbyists several hours. And it did it in minutes.

More here.

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Panoply of the Weird

Michael Dirda at the NYRB:

Back in the early 1930s Gilbert Seldes—a literary critic and early champion of popular culture—was asked to contribute an introduction to a volume of stories by Fitz-James O’Brien, now often regarded as the most original American writer of supernatural fiction between Edgar Allan Poe and Ambrose Bierce. At first Seldes declined, confessing that he’d never read anything by the man. But when the publisher jogged his memory, Seldes remembered that in some anthology or another he had in fact come across “The Diamond Lens,” O’Brien’s 1858 account of an obsessive microscopist who discovers an Eden-like world in a drop of water—and falls in love with the beautiful woman who lives in it.

Seldes finally did introduce The Diamond Lens and Other Stories, published in 1932 as a limited edition with subtly sinister illustrations by Ferdinand Huszti Horvath. The book featured seven of O’Brien’s tales of the weird and grotesque, most notably “The Wondersmith,” which centers on a satanic toymaker whose miniature figures can be animated to kill the young children who play with them. According to Anthony Boucher, who reprinted the story in the December 1950 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, “almost the whole body of writing on robots is here in matrix.”

more here.

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Brigitte Bardot Did Not Ask To Be Forgiven

Gerry Brakus at The New Statesman:

Bardot’s significance was never confined to her acting. She mattered because she altered the image of womanhood at a moment when female beauty was expected to reassure. She unsettled instead. Her looseness, physical and emotional, her apparent boredom with approval, her refusal to perform refinement, all suggested a form of autonomy that was felt before it was articulated. She did not argue for freedom. She behaved as if it already belonged to her.

She never aligned herself with feminism in any organised or ideological sense, and she showed little interest in collective struggle. Yet her presence did feminist work all the same. Desire, in her case, did not feel offered up for permission. It seemed to reside with her first. She expanded what a woman could look like without claiming responsibility for what followed. Part of Bardot’s authority came from her refusal to revise herself. She did not attempt to improve her face, correct her body, or negotiate with time. Nor did she soften her views to remain agreeable.

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Politics today is driven by grievances that can never be assuaged

Paul Katsafanas at Aeon:

In April 2025, Donald Trump took the stage to mark the 100th day of his second term as US president. You might have expected a moment of triumph. He had reclaimed the presidency, consolidated power within the Republican Party, and issued a vast range of executive orders. But the mood wasn’t celebratory. It was combative. Trump spent most of his time attacking his predecessor Joe Biden, repeating false claims about the 2020 election, denouncing the press, and warning of threats posed by immigrants, ‘radical Left lunatics’ and corrupt elites. The tone was familiar: angry, aggrieved, unrelenting. Even in victory, the focus was on enemies and retribution.

This dynamic isn’t unique to the United States. Leaders like Narendra Modi in India, Viktor Orbán in Hungary and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil have built movements that thrive on perpetual grievance. Even after consolidating power, they continue to cast their nations as under siege – from immigrants, intellectuals, journalists or cultural elites. The rhetoric remains combative, the mood aggrieved.

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Progress fighting pancreatic cancer — one of the deadliest malignancies

Amber Dance in Knowable Magazine:

A diagnosis of pancreatic cancer is devastating news. Though it makes up only about 3 percent of cancers in the United States, it’s one of the deadliest, and on track for a dark achievement: By 2030, it’s expected to kill more people in the United States than any cancer except for lung cancer. This apparent paradox is arising because screening and treatments for other cancers have surged ahead, while pancreatic cancer has remained tricky both to identify and to treat.

Nonetheless, there’s reason for hope, says Anna Berkenblit, chief scientific and medical officer for the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network in El Segundo, California, which supports research and helps patients. Scientists are testing new medicines that disable drivers of cancer that were once considered undruggable. They’re training patients’ immune systems to attack tumors once thought to be invisible to the body’s defenses. And they’re harnessing artificial intelligence to catch pancreatic cancer in early, vulnerable stages.

More here.

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Five-Year-Old Mini Brains Can Now Mimic a Kindergartener’s Neural Wiring. It’s Time to Talk Ethics

Shelly Fan in Singularity Hub:

When brain organoids were introduced roughly a decade ago, they were a scientific curiosity. The pea-sized blobs of brain tissue grown from stem cells mimicked parts of the human brain, giving researchers a 3D model to study, instead of the usual flat layer of neurons in a dish. Scientists immediately realized they were special. Mini brains developed nearly the whole range of human brain cells, including neurons that sparked with electrical activity, making them an excellent way to observe and study the human brain—without the brain itself.

As the technology advanced and brain organoids matured, researchers coaxed them to grow structural layers with blood vessels roughly mimicking the cortex, the part of the brain that handles reasoning, working memory, and other high-level cognitive tasks. Parallel efforts derived organoids for other parts of the brain. Mini brains can be made from a person’s skin cells and faithfully carry the genetic mutations that could cause neurodevelopmental disorderssuch as autism. The lab-grown blobs also provide a nearly infinite source of transplantable neural tissue, which in theory could help heal the brain after a stroke or other traumatic events. In early studies, organoids transplanted into rodent brains formed neural connections with resident brain cells.

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Sunday, December 28, 2025

Sunday Poem

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
.,
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
;;
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
,,
And miles to go before I sleep.


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Park Chan-wook and the Funny Thing About Stomach-Churning Horror

Robert Ito in The New York Times:

Park Chan-wook is one of Asia’s most famous directors, an auteur beloved as much for his complex, often critical visions of his home country of South Korea as for scenes of stomach-churning horror. But when Park started work on “No Other Choice,” he really wanted to direct it as an American film, so much so that he spent 12 frustrating years trying to get financing from Hollywood studios. The source material, Donald E. Westlake’s 1997 horror thriller novel, “The Ax,” was based in the United States, “so it just felt very natural to me,” he said. “I didn’t put too much other thought in it.”

Beyond the novel’s suburban East Coast setting, the plot and lead character also felt particularly American to the Korean director: a manager of a paper company has his life upended by corporate downsizing, and to secure a new job, he sets about murdering his rivals in increasingly gruesome ways. “This is a story about the capitalist system,” Park said. “I thought it would be best told in America, since America is the heart of capitalism.”

More here.

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To see America’s greatest living painter, you’ll have to cross the pond

Sebastian Smee in The Washington Post:

Kerry James Marshall is contemporary art’s great engine tinkerer. He wants to know how things work. In the 1990s, when his contemporaries were making slight, cerebral works using found objects, photography and minimalism to poeticize the commonplace or reveal hidden ideologies, Marshall fell in love with the creakingly old idea of paintings as “machines.”

“I’ve always wanted to be a history painter on a grand scale like Giotto and Géricault,” he said in 1994. As soon as you get interested in the “how” of things, you become conscious that they might have been done differently. That consciousness may open a crack of potential: They might yet be done differently.

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Saturday, December 27, 2025

Transformation without Taxation

César Morales Oyarvide in Phenomenal World:

In his famous 1918 essay “The Crisis of the Tax State,” Joseph Schumpeter captured the essence of fiscal sociology, arguing that “The spirit of a people, its cultural level, its social structure, the deeds its policy may prepare—all this and more is written in its fiscal history … He who knows how to listen to its message here discerns the thunder of world history more clearly than anywhere else.” In Mexico, however, this principle seems to have been suspended. There the Schumpeterian thunder is not heard. The project of the Fourth Transformation (4T), launched by Andrés Manuel López Obrador in 2018 and passed down to Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo last year, has sought to reorganize domestic political power, and it has had considerable success—redefining the national narrative and restructuring public spending priorities. Yet it has not significantly altered the tax structure built by previous governments.

This fiscal silence is even more surprising in light of the experiences of other leftist administrations in Latin America. In Bolivia, Evo Morales combined strategic nationalizations with an aggressive expansion of the fiscal apparatus. In Brazil, successive PT governments broadened the tax base while transferring income to the poorest citizens. Despite grappling with high levels of informality and low trust in state institutions, these projects understood that without new resources, it would be impossible to create new social rights. The 4T, by contrast, has tried to square the circle of distribution without serious tax reform.

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The Pattiverse

James Wolcott in Sidecar:

2025 marks the fiftieth anniversary of Patti Smith’s debut album Horses, with Robert Mapplethorpe’s black and white cover portrait of the artist posed with her jacket slung over her shoulder, Frank Sinatra-style – ‘the most electrifying image I had ever seen of a woman of my generation’, exclaimed Camille Paglia, who reckoned it one of the most powerful portraits since the French Revolution. The record inside the cover sleeve hasn’t wilted either, retaining its classic status as a declaration of desperado intent, from the boppy ‘Redondo Beach’ to the trippy ‘Birdland’ to the unfolding vistas of ‘Gloria’ and ‘Land (of a Thousand Dances)’, where Patti could truly stretch out her skinny arms and fan out her fingers to spread the word. (As the choreographer Paul Taylor once quipped, that’s the definition of lyricism: long arms.) To celebrate the album’s fiftieth, Patti and her band have been touring triumphal live concert versions of Horses across the US and Europe, the rapturous reception at the London Palladium somewhat mottled when Patti brought out Johnny Depp for the encore anthem ‘People Have the Power’, Depp draped and layered in hipster duds in his continuing role as America’s premier hobosexual. Irate fans and commentators on both sides of the Atlantic squawked betrayal, trying to reconcile the populist idealism of Patti’s music and persona with jamming on stage with an alleged spouse abuser and celebrity prima donna who owns a private island in the Exumas.

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The Makers of Modern China

Zheng Xiaoqiong in Equator:

Introduction by Kaiser Kuo

I first encountered Zheng Xiaoqiong’s writing in a collection of Chinese worker poetry skillfully translated by Eleanor Goodman (2016). What struck me then about her poetry, and what remains true in this prose selection, is Zheng’s attentiveness to the texture of migrant-worker life. She restores dignity not through political theatrics, but through rigorous sensory detail: the clang of metal, the sting of dust, the smell of dirty socks, the fluorescent fatigue of factory nights, and cramped dormitories where shirtless men play cards and chainsmoke. She records the world as it is felt by the people who move through it. In doing so, she opens a space in which they can be seen as individuals – complicated, vulnerable and never reduced to symbols.

These subjects are caught in a trap that has structured millions of lives over the past four decades. On one side lies the village: impoverished, agrarian and socially stifling. On the other lies the city: dazzling and modern, but also cold, precarious and brutally indifferent. Zheng’s writing captures the psychic tension of that in-between space – the feeling of being suspended between two worlds, belonging fully to neither. She resists both the standard, agency-stripping sweatshop narrative and the counternarrative of migrant labour as liberation from rural drudgery.

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Friday, December 26, 2025

The new anthology of stories inspired by Alfred Hitchcock

M. Keith Booker at the Los Angeles Review of Books:

EDITOR MAXIM JAKUBOWSKI has recently made something of a specialty of compiling collections of stories inspired by the work of his favorite writers, including Cornell Woolrich and J. G. Ballard. In his newest anthology, he has gathered 24 original (commissioned) stories inspired in one way or another by the life and work of Alfred Hitchcock. Such a collection is no surprise given the ongoing prominence in American film culture of Hitchcock’s work and of Hitchcock as an individual. Indeed, while it has now been a century since the release of the first feature film he directed and nearly half a century since his last, Hitchcock remains one of the most widely recognizable names (and silhouettes) in cinema history. In addition, the concept of the “Hitchcockian” is so well established that it provides a perfect starting point for such a themed collection.

It is little wonder, then, that Jakubowski has been able to assemble quite an impressive array of authors who are celebrated in various fields, especially crime and mystery fiction. The stories in the collection are excellent reads in their own right, though Hitchcock’s ongoing aura is such that the real fun resides in discovering exactly how each author has decided to carry out the “inspired by” charge they were given.

More here.

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The rise of AI denialism

Louis Rosenberg at Big Think:

Over the past few months, we’ve seen a surge of skepticism around the phenomenon currently referred to as the “AI boom.” The shift began when OpenAI released GPT-5 this summer to mixed reviews, mostly from casual users. We’ve since had months of breathless claims from pundits and influencers that the era of rapid AI advancement is ending, that AI scaling has hit the wall, and that the AI boom is just another tech bubble. These same voices overuse the phrase “AI slop” to disparage the remarkable images, documents, videos, and code that AI models produce at the touch of a button.

I find this perspective both absurd and dangerous.

By any objective measure, AI continues to improve at a stunning pace. The impressive leap in capabilities made by Gemini 3 in November is just the latest example. No, AI scaling has not hit the wall. In fact, I can’t think of another technology that has advanced this quickly at any point during my lifetime, and I started programming in 1982. The computer on my desk today runs thousands of times faster and has a million times more memory than my first PC (a TRS-80 model III), and yet, today’s rate of AI advancement leaves me dizzy.

So why has the public latched onto the narrative that AI is stalling, that the output is slop, and that the AI boom is just another tech bubble that lacks justifiable use-cases?

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On twenty-first-century performative morality

Yoanna Koleva at The Hedgehog Review:

Tragedies, wars, and scandals are transformed into Instagram moments. The instant horror strikes—a terror attack, a catastrophe—social-media platforms erupt with ritual phrases: recycled mantras of “We will take immediate action,” “We condemn…,” “We stand in solidarity….” Rarely do these words lead to deeds. A Ukrainian flag by a profile picture. A #StandWithPalestine sticker. This simplified #empathy and performative #goodness are measured in likes, hearts, and views.

One of the more striking examples of a promise turned meme is the West’s support for Ukraine. Since the beginning of the war, all the tears, embraces, and sympathy for Ukraine, all the declarations of unity and fraternity, have come paired with emphatic but often unfulfilled promises of military support or NATO membership.

More here.

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