How do I love you?
Oh, this way and that way.
Oh, happily. Perhaps
I may elaborate by
demonstration? Like
this, and
like this and
…………………. no more words now
by Mary Oliver
from Felicity -Poems
Penguin Press, NY, 2016
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Yagnishsing Dawoor in The Guardian:
Mohammed Hanif’s novels address the more troubling aspects of Pakistani history and politics with unhinged, near-treasonous irreverence. His 2008 Booker-longlisted debut, A Case of Exploding Mangoes, was a scabrously comic portrait of General Zia-ul-Haq in the days leading up to his death in a suspicious plane crash in 1988. Masquerading as a whodunnit, it was a satire of religiosity and military authoritarianism. Dark, irony-soaked comedy that marries farce to unsparing truth-telling was also the chosen mode for other vexed subjects, from violence against women and religious minorities in Our Lady of Alice Bhatti to the war machine in Red Birds.
Hanif’s prickly new novel confirms his standing as one of south Asia’s most unnervingly funny and subversive voices. The story kicks off right after ousted socialist PM Zulfikar Ali Bhutto is put to death by army chief turned autocrat Zia. Following the execution, disgraced intelligence officer Gul has been posted to OK Town, a sleepy backwater where he “would need to create his own entertainment and come up with a mission to shine on this punishment posting”.
More here.
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Adam Kroetsch at Policy and Practice:
We need clinical trial abundance. When trials are slow and costly, it doesn’t just hurt the pharmaceutical industry that pays for the trials – it limits how many treatments reach patients and how quickly they arrive. Less expensive, more abundant trials would lead to more treatments and cures.
Experts across the field – from industry leaders to FDA commissioners – agree that clinical trials need reform. And many have offered solutions. But while proposed solutions are easy to find, we have not yet seen a clear explanation of exactly why clinical trials are so inefficient in the first place. Why does an industry that depends so heavily on trials allow them to become so slow and expensive? Without a diagnosis, we don’t know whether we are providing the right treatment.
So in this post, I’d like to take a deep dive: what are the root causes of inefficient trials? And how do we fix them?
More here.
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Alex Smith at the Asian Review of Books:
At the core of Wang’s argument is the assertion that for all their similarities, the two countries often function as “inversions” of one another. Labels of capitalist, neoliberal, communist and socialist have limited utility when it comes to the United States and China of the present. Instead, Wang argues, China is best understood as an “engineering state”, while the United States is a “lawyerly society”.
Wang defines China’s engineering state as one dominated by technocratic engineers—Wang’s paternal grandparents, he notes later in the book, met while they were studying to be chemical engineers—and characterised by major public works projects, often carried out despite huge environmental and human costs. But above all, Wang contends, China has long been engaged in a project of social engineering, shaping and moulding its population for more important political and economic ends.
The United States’ lawyerly society, by contrast, is dominated by lawyers who are better at blocking construction rather than enabling it. While the law is often used by the wealthy and elites to further their own interests, it has also enabled pluralism and respect for individual rights, features both notably absent in the engineering society.
More here.
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Simon Critchley at The Guardian:
Beginning with the Anglicanism of St Mary’s Church in Bromley, where Bowie sang in the choir, continuing with his immersion in Tibetan Buddhism in the late 1960s and on to the occultism of Aleister Crowley, Ormerod unpacks the religious preoccupations of Bowie’s art in compelling prose. But still, it all seems rather straightforward and the little stabs at philosophy (Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and so on) feel a tiny bit Wiki.
But the book takes on a growing velocity when analysing Bowie’s later work, particularly in the chapter on Heathen (I’ve not read anything as good on that album). This momentum develops into fine, detailed discussions of The Next Day and Blackstar, and also Lazarus, his stunning final experiment with musical theatre. What makes these sections so good is that Ormerod deals with Bowie as text; as the occasion for close reading, which I think is what his work, like all good art, deserves.
more here.
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Tyler Dean at Artforum:
Coppola’s adaptation cleaves relatively closely to the plot of Stoker’s novel, but Besson’s script replicates, almost exactly, only the parts of Coppola’s film that deviate from Stoker’s story. In both films, Dracula is explicitly the undead Vlad Ţepeș (the Wallachian warlord whose moniker Stoker borrowed while eschewing the rest of the actual history), in love with his wife, who dies during the Count’s fight against the Ottoman Empire. In both films, the character of Mina Murray is reimagined as the reincarnation and doppelgänger of said dead wife, and lengthy sequences are added in which Dracula and Mina have a secret courtship and fall in love. But in its deviation from Stoker’s text, Besson’s Dracula introduces some intriguing if somewhat underdeveloped ideas: Besson combines Renfield (Dracula’s asylum-bound thrall) and Lucy (his first victim) into a single character. The Van Helsing role is filled by an unnamed priest, played by Christoph Waltz, who muses about the obligations of lapsed Christians (like Dracula) to a God who has failed them. This Dracula also has all the visual hallmarks of a typical Besson film: an arresting, overblown style; intricately choreographed, dance-like action sequences (and dance sequences); slapstick with a 50 percent hit rate; weird, cutesy little CGI dudes.
more here.
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Saima Sidik in Harvard Magazine:
An axolotl is a salamander with a superpower: it can regrow its limbs. When a predator chomps off its leg or it loses an appendage in an accident, a new one will quickly take its place.
Many scientists would like to know how the axolotl does this and whether it’s possible to stimulate lost limbs to regrow in humans, too. In recent decades, research has focused on how cells around an axolotl’s injury site reorganize to kick off limb regeneration. But in fact, the animal’s whole body jumps into action, as regenerative biologist Jessica Whited and her colleagues describe in a study recently published in Cell. The molecular marks of limb amputation were evident in “basically all the places we looked,” Whited says, including in unamputated limbs.
More here.
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Andrew Chow in Time Magazine:
When Bad Bunny emerged from a row of towering sugar cane stalks to kick off his Super Bowl halftime show performance, it might have been easy to read the set design as little more than a lush backdrop: a tableau of Caribbean paradise imported to the Bay. Bad Bunny certainly didn’t explicitly acknowledge the sugar cane: He was too busy singing “Tití Me Preguntó,” a brash ode to his sexual prowess, which has racked up a billion streams both on Spotify and YouTube.
But like everything that Bad Bunny does, the scene cut deeper than its appearance. The Puerto Rican singer surrounded himself with men and women cutting down the stalks, summoning the territory’s centuries-long colonization, in which sugar played a central role. Spain brought the crop to the island in the 1500s and set up massive plantations manned by slaves. At the end of the 19th century, the United States took the island by force and set up its own lucrative sugar colony, with mainland corporations controlling a significant share of production and reaping massive profits.
More here.
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Henry Farrell in Programmable Mutter:
I did the Ezra Klein show last Friday, and it went up on the NYT website this morning. A whole lot has happened in the meantime. The way I think is through talking with other people, and a lot of thinking happened in the conversation. It wove together what happened in the world last week with what is happening in Minneapolis, in ways that I am still trying to work out. So here is a short interim report, written less as a polished essay than an attempt to pull these thoughts together.
What became clearer to me, as Ezra and I talked, is the connection between the limits to US power in the world, and the limits to the Trump administration’s power inside the borders of America. We briefly mentioned a long-ago fight that I had with the late David Graeber, who advanced a theory of world politics in his book, Debt, that described the global economy as a tribute system, and emphasized the awesome power of the United States to terrify the rest of the world into submission. Back then, I disagreed with Graeber’s claims and Graeber took strong exception to my disagreement, provoking a very long response from me. The upshot of my argument was that the United States is incapable of pulling what I called the “Delian League Switcheroo.” Thucydides describes how 5th century BCE Athens transformed its alliance against the Persians, the Delian League, into a protection racket to squeeze allies and turn them into vassals. I argued back then that the US would find it very hard to do this at scale…
More here.
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In The Ideas Letter, Aaron Benanav, Leif Weatherby, and Evgeny Morozov debate AI, capitalism and socialism:
Evgeny Morozov knows how to theorize (and, a fortiori, how to intellectually provoke) like few other mortals. The elegance of his argumentation and the sophistication of his critiques are legendary. Several issues back, Morozov launched a grenade by suggesting that socialist attempts to harness AI have treated it like other basic tools of capitalist production—as a neutral instrument that can simply be redirected—rather than as a transformative force that actively shapes social values and human capacities.
We now have two responses to Morozov’s original essay, one from the Cornell historian Aaron Benanav, a target of Morozov’s earlier salvo, and another from the NYU scholar Leif Weatherby. For Benanav, humanity stands between two technological revolutions—generative AI and the green energy transition—and how we choose between them will determine the shape of the future. His essay develops a broader project of designing a post-capitalist “multidimensional economy” (for more see his coruscating essays in New Left Review this past year ) while rebutting Morozov’s claim that such a framework would stifle technological “worldmaking.”
Weatherby, who looks at both Morozov and Benanav, argues that contemporary Marxist and socialist analyses of technology fail to engage adequately with the entanglement between technological rationality and capitalist ideology. To understand AI and the digital economy, Weatherby suggests, one must see them as the logical outcomes of a longstanding merger between mathematics, computation, and neoliberal governance—a fusion that has turned “optimization” into both the logic and the theology of capitalism itself.
Morozov responds in analytically stentorian tones asserting misrepresentation. His rebuttal is a blistering defense of his original essay on socialism and AI.
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Steffen Murau in Phenomenal World:
One year into Donald Trump’s second term, the global economic order is being given a facelift that wouldn’t look out of place at his Mar-a-Lago beach club. The President has turned his famous penchant for tariffs—“the most beautiful word in the English language”—into an agenda for national rejuvenation, imposing them on allies and enemies alike. Stunned commentators have made various attempts to interpret the sweeping trade restrictions: as a break with the US role in superintending world capitalism, a tool to bully individual states into signing favorable deals, or a mindless assertion of raw power. Yet there is still no consensus about either the nature of this shift or its long-term implications.
Some have sought answers in the work of Trump’s former economic adviser Stephen Miran, now member of the Federal Reserve’s board of governors, whose policy document A User’s Guide to Restructuring the Global Trading System was published in the runup to the 2024 election. The paper appears to explain the logic behind many of the decisions which have played out since, calling for a “generational change” to “put American industry on fairer grounds vis-à-vis the rest of the world,” with tariffs the primary vehicle. The dollar’s strength for the past half century, writes Miran, has made US exports too expensive for the rest of the world to buy, while making imports too cheap for American consumers to pass up. The result has been the degradation of American manufacturing and industrial output. “Persistent dollar overvaluation” is said to flow from the way in which “dollar assets function as the world’s reserve currency.” It is simply too burdensome for the US to “finance the provision of reserve assets and the defense umbrella, as the manufacturing and tradeable sectors bear the brunt of the costs.”
Miran is not alone in arguing for the dollar’s devaluation.
More here.
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From VOI:
JAKARTA – Amid the excitement of the World Governments Summit (WGS) 2026 in Dubai, United Arab Emirates (UAE), a forum usually filled with majestic speeches, technological futurism and discussions of world leaders, there was a guest whose presence was the most silent, but his message was the most resounding. Nolan is the first human to receive a Neuralink brain implant, a breakthrough that has only been present in science fiction books. And in the forum held on February 3-5, Nolan brought a simple sentence: “This technology has brought my life back.” Nolan still remembers the day he was told he would be the first subject in human history to undergo a Neuralink implant. There were no tears, no long pauses like in a movie scene. There was urgency.
“Everything happened very quickly. All we think about is logistics: what to prepare, how to get there. But in my heart, I think about the possibilities. I think it will be fun, and I want to help people,” he said on the sidelines of the WGS 2026 event, as quoted Friday (6/2). The decision was not an easy one for someone living with quadriplegia, a condition that left him paralyzed from the neck down after an accident years ago. But for Nolan, the courage came from one thing: the belief that his life could still be of benefit.
More here.
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—re: Black History Month in the U.S.
hey music and
me
only white,
hair a flutter of
fall leaves
circling my perfect
line of a nose,
no lips,
no behind, hey
white me
and I’m wearing
white history
but there’s no future
in those clothes
so i take them off and
wake up
dancing.
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Paul Bloom at Small Potatoes:
We are born with a yearning for the spiritual and transcendent, and the difficult truths about life that we learn about as we grow older—such as the inevitability of death and the existence of terrible injustices—further push us towards faith. Without religion, or something close enough to religion, we are unhappy and unsatisfied. Blaise Pascal was wise when he said that secular pursuits can’t quench our thirst—“the infinite abyss can only be filled by an infinite and immutable object, that is to say, only by God Himself.” As it’s sometimes put, there is a God-shaped hole that we all need to fill.
I know a lot of people who believe all this. But I’m becoming increasingly confident that all of the above sentences are false.
There was always reason to be skeptical. For one thing, the idea of inborn spiritual yearning never made much evolutionary sense.
More here.
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