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Jonathan O’Callaghan in New Scientist:

We are only a month into 2026, yet it’s already clear what one of the major space stories of the year is going to be: mega-constellations, and the ongoing attempts to launch thousands of satellites into Earth’s orbit.

The latest development is that SpaceX has asked the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for permission to launch 1 million orbital data centre satellites. The request is unprecedented. The previous largest filing with the FCC, also by SpaceX, was for 42,000 Starlink satellites in 2019.

“This is beyond what’s been proposed by any constellation,” says Victoria Samson at the Secure World Foundation in the US.

SpaceX already operates the largest fleet of satellites in orbit, the Starlink internet constellation, which makes up about 9500 of the 14,500 satellites in orbit – but the fleet represents just 1 per cent of SpaceX’s planned orbital data centre satellites. Those Starlink satellites alone are already making conditions in orbit hazardous, with SpaceX having to dodge 300,000 collisions in 2025.

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Christin Bohnke at JSTOR Daily:

In August 1968, a visiting foreign minister from Pakistan, Mian Arshad Hussain, gave Mao a box of mangoes as a gift during a state visit. Presenting mangoes has a long tradition in Pakistan, but in China, the fruit was virtually unknown. Mao passed the box to workers occupying the Tsinghua campus in Beijing, who were attempting to control the Red Guards stationed there. The scholar of Chinese visual culture Alfreda Murck writes that the mangoes carried an implicit message: from now on, the workers, not the Red Guards, would be in charge of education and the transformation of China in Mao’s image.

According to Murck, even Mao could not have anticipated the consequences of his gift. Because the mangoes came from the supreme leader, they were transformed, in the eyes of the workers, from a simple fruit into an object endowed with attributes of the divine. William H. Hinton, the author of Fanshen, compiled eyewitness accounts of workers who reported staying up all night, touching the mangoes, and marveling at their new station as protégés of the Chairman. Using the momentum, the official party cadres concocted a propaganda campaign surrounding the mangoes, workers, and Mao, and in doing so, according to the political scientist Richard Baum, effectively signed “the death warrant of the Red Guards.”

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Hermione Hoby at The New Yorker:

David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest,” a book whose notorious bigness comprises both physical size and reputational heft, turns thirty in February. The occasion is a moment to ask how a novel that mourns addiction and venerates humility and patience became a glib cultural punch line—a byword for literary arrogance, a totem of masculine pretentiousness, a red flag if spotted on the shelves of a prospective partner, and reading matter routinely subjected to the word “performative” in its most damning sense. At a thousand and seventy-nine pages, “Infinite Jest” has become a one-liner.

Last year, an article in the Guardian explored the risks of so-called performative reading under the title “Is it OK to read Infinite Jest in public?” For the Guardian writer, the question was a rare refutation of Betteridge’s law, the journalistic adage stating that any headline ending in a question mark can be answered with a no. Here the answer was a nervous and tentative yes. Mostly, though, the piece drew on and perpetuated the archetype of the noxious “Infinite Jest” bro which has solidified in the quick-drying cement of social media. In 2020, the “Jest” bro hit the big screen in Emerald Fennell’s heavy-handed “Promising Young Woman,” in which a D.F.W. fanboy tells Carey Mulligan’s character that she has to read “Consider the Lobster,” one of the author’s essay collections.

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Thomas E. Miles at The Hedgehog Review:

Why bother? What’s the point? These are questions that inevitably arise in conversations about college programs in prisons. But these questions make certain assumptions about education in general and higher education in prisons specifically. What is it, exactly, that is not worth it, according to skeptics and naysayers, about college education in prison? Ought we not to consider just what the point of education is in the first place? My position as a prisoner has given me the opportunity to contemplate the question and arrive at some insight into it.

Sometime around 2017, I applied to the Bennington College Prison Education Initiative (PEI) at Great Meadow Correctional Facility in Comstock, New York.

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Shelly Fan in Singularity Hub:

How do you translate a Roman inscription found on a tombstone? How many pairs of tendons are supported by one bone in hummingbirds? Here is a chemical reaction that requires three steps: What are they? Based on the latest research on Tiberian pronunciation, identify all syllables ending in a consonant sound from this Hebrew text.

These are just a few example questions from the latest attempt to measure the capability of large language models. These algorithms power ChatGPT and Gemini. They’re getting “smarter” in specific domains—math, biology, medicine, programming—and developing a sort of common sense. Like the dreaded standardized tests we endured in school, researchers have long relied on benchmarks to track AI performance. But as cutting-edge algorithms now regularly score over 90 percent on such tests, older benchmarks are increasingly becoming obsolete.

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Dream Father

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Hannah Ritchie at By the Numbers:

Which country has the highest rates of diabetes? Many people would guess the United States. Perhaps Canada or Australia? Mexico? The United Kingdom?

According to the International Diabetes Federation, it’s Pakistan.

Take a look at the map below, which plots the prevalence of diabetes among 20 to 79-year-olds.

Now, this data is what we call “age-standardised”. The risk of diabetes, like many diseases, increases with age. So if we were to map the raw (or crude) rates of diabetes, it would strongly reflect how old populations are.

To understand changes in prevalence and risk beyond aging, we use age-standardised metrics that hold the age structure of the population constant over time and across countries. It imagines that the age distribution of every country is the same.

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Stephen Westich at The Hedgehog Review:

Investigating the crypto-religious is Elie’s venture in this book. Readers of Elie’s first two books, The Life You Save May Be Your Own and Reinventing Bach, will be familiar with his interest in complicating the boundary between secular and sacred with close readings of literary and musical works through the lens of their makers’ spiritual struggles and developments. One way he expands on these ideas in The Last Supper is by foregrounding the visual arts in his analysis. But a second, more central expansion comes from his concept of the crypto-religious. He borrows the term from the Polish poet Czesław Miłosz, who wrote to Thomas Merton that “I have always been crypto-religious and in a conflict with the political aspect of Polish Catholicism.” For Miłosz, this meant concealing his religious inclinations within his homeland’s Communist regime and alluding to early Christians hiding in Roman crypts. Elie expands the phrase to cover much more: “Crypto-religious art is work that incorporates religious words and images and motifs but expresses something other than conventional belief. It’s work that raises the question of what the person who made it believes, so that the question of what it means to believe is crucial to the work’s effect: as you see it, hear it, read it, listen to it, you wind up reflecting on your own beliefs.”

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Rachel Gerry at the LARB:

In the genre of sanatorium literature, An Infinite Sadness stands apart. It doesn’t have much of the fellow feeling that defines Thomas Mann’s classic The Magic Mountain (1924), in which Hans Castorp, bowled over by love and intellectual companionship, struggles to leave the Berghof hospital. In Christa Wolf’s August (2012), the protagonist reflects on the affecting compassion of a fellow resident in a TB clinic, while in Ken Kesey’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962), the bonds among the patients form the basis of their resistance to institutional authority. Alphonse Daudet, while seeking relief from spinal pain in a thermal spa, wrote that “the patients, in all their weirdness and diversity, draw comfort from the demonstration that their respective illnesses all have something in common.” Stories set in sanatoriums tend to show their characters slowly settling into their new homes, the world slipping away, time taking on different proportions. Separated from the imperatives of productivity, the sanatorium is an imaginative space in which the future is null and progress uncertain. As sickness becomes the rule instead of the exception, the patient begins to exist authentically, in a reality defined by a community of fellow sufferers.

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Sahar Delijani in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

I am not writing this essay as an author, nor as an activist, nor as a representative of the Iranian people. I am writing this as the daughter of former dissidents who lost the best days of their lives in the prisons of the Islamic Republic. As the daughter of a woman who was forced to give birth behind bars, interrogated while going through labor. As the niece of a man executed on a summer morning alongside thousands of others, his body swallowed by an unmarked mass grave. As the granddaughter of working-class grandparents who endured endless humiliations and hardships to raise grandchildren whose parents languished in the regime’s houses of horror.

I am writing this as a woman who has carried the inheritance of violence, repression and state-sponsored terror all her life, as a little girl who learned early the discipline of silence, who knew what could never be said to strangers about where her parents had been and what had been done to them.

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A Violet Darkness

Jasper Craven in Harper’s Magazine:

Four days after online sports betting was officially launched in New York State, I got a hot tip from a football player in Pittsburgh. It was January 2022, and Ben Roethlisberger, the lumbering thirty-nine-year-old Steelers quarterback, was telling the press that his upcoming postseason bout against fellow signal-caller Patrick Mahomes and the Kansas City Chiefs wasn’t going to end well. “We probably aren’t supposed to be here,” he said. “We’re probably not a very good football team.” A few seconds later, as if his point weren’t already clear, he added, “We don’t have a chance.” I didn’t know much about sports betting, but even I could appreciate a good opportunity.

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Flora Graham in Nature:

Nearly 40% of new cancer cases worldwide are potentially preventable, according to one of the first investigations¹ of its kind, which analysed dozens of cancer types in almost 200 countries.

The study found that in 2022, roughly seven million cancer diagnoses were linked to modifiable risk factors — those that can be changed, controlled or managed to reduce the likelihood of developing the disease. Overall, tobacco smoking was the leading contributor to worldwide cancer cases, followed by infections and drinking alcohol. The findings suggest that avoiding such risk factors is “one of the most powerful ways that we can potentially reduce the future cancer burden”, says study co-author Hanna Fink, a cancer epidemiologist at the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer in Lyon, France.

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Kyle Paoletta and A.S. Hamrah at The Nation:

Hamrah’s most recent project was Last Week in End Times Cinema, a weekly newsletter collecting together “pathetic and ridiculous” news stories about the movie business. (True to form, Hamrah blasted these digests out from his EarthLink account rather than bothering with Substack.) Those columns are now available in a separate collection as well. There are dispiriting headlines like “Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey 2 Ending Explained” and summaries of news stories about Sam Altman, the “eyebrowless CEO of OpenAI,” suggesting “AI might figure out on its own how to stop itself from ending the human race.” Read enough of these missives and it becomes obvious why studio heads were too focused on replacing actors with algorithms to properly market a film like Train Dreams, filing it away in Netflix’s library of slop after a curtailed theatrical release.

Together, Algorithm of the Night and Last Week in End Times Cinema provide a sardonic—yet sobering—guide to the societal breakdown of 2020s America. 

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Scott Alexander at Astral Codex Ten:

What’s the difference between ‘real’ and ‘roleplaying’?

One possible answer invokes internal reality. Are the AIs conscious? Do they “really” “care” about the things they’re saying? We may never figure this out. Luckily, it has no effect on the world, so we can leave it to the philosophers1.

I find it more fruitful to think about external reality instead, especially in terms of causes and effects.

Does Moltbook have real causes?If an agent posts “I hate my life, my human is making me work on a cryptocurrency site and it’s the most annoying thing ever”, does this correspond to a true state of affairs? Is the agent really working on a cryptocurrency site? Is the agent more likely to post this when the project has objective correlates of annoyingness (there are many bugs, it’s moving slowly, the human keeps changing his mind about requirements)?

Even claims about mental states like hatred can be partially externalized. Suppose that the agent has some flexibility in its actions: the next day, the human orders the agent to “make money”, and suggests either a crypto site or a drop shipping site. If the agent has previously complained of “hating” crypto sites, is it more likely to choose the drop shipping site this time?

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