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Scott Alexander at Astral Codex Ten:

Art is long, life is short. Most of us only manage to not do a few things in our limited span on Earth. But the Frankfurt School managed to not invent so many movements – to not be involved in so many of the crucial ideological shifts of the past century – that they caught my attention. Who were these people? What other aspects of our culture might we be unable to say they were involved in? For answers, I turned to the classic history of the group, Martin Jay’s The Dialectical Imagination.

The basics are simple enough: the School was founded in Frankfurt in 1923. It attracted great philosophers like Max Horkheimer, Theodore Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse. When the Nazis took power in the early 1930s, the mostly-Jewish Frankfurters fled to America, where friendly locals helped them continue their work in affiliation with Columbia University. Mid-century Americans were suckers for sophisticated European intellectuals, and when the rise of fascism and World War II started dominating headlines, the German-Jewish Frankfurters were natural experts to help Americans process the situation. By the end of the war, they were firmly established as thought leaders.

More here.

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Ariana Cha in The Washington Post:

Take the Fall and Trust

Dancing outside on a rocky place
with a beautiful woman, humming a song
we both sort of know. I’m caught
by her long thick graceful hair.
She is as graceful as her hair
and does a sudden dip hanging suspended
from my arms above the sharp stones.
Suddenly I know my knee will not hold.
Panicked, I try to get her to the grass
before it and I go, and I do and it does,
and I tumble down a slight hill more
nimble than Jack, for I do not break
my crown or any of the attached limbs
but flip head over heels and land,
startled on my back. There was a moment
almost to the grass, when I said
to myself – time to let go – and I relaxed
all over my body, accepting the fall
I could do nothing about – and so
we were unhurt. Have I learned at last
to do this, to let go and take the fall
and trust the earth will be kind – sometimes?

by Nils Peterson
from Task: To Be Where I Am, 2025

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Simon Paret-Poupart in Harper’s Magazine:

I’m a garbageman. Day after day, I heave and haul the detritus of the most polluting civilization in history. In two decades, I’ve handled tens of thousands of tons of trash, and the looks I get along my route suggest that people sometimes mistake me for the garbage I handle. The way I see it, though, my job is of great consequence. My fellow garbagemen and I scrub clean the stains of our consumer society. Our work behind the scenes keeps the whole edifice from crumbling—at least for now.

The garbageman is Sisyphus, a hapless laborer condemned to go from house to house picking up bags, swept along in the never-ending flow of the refuse we produce. Every day he resumes this labor anew. If he weren’t there to shoulder this burden, everything would fall apart. The rats would take over, the air would turn fetid, plague and cholera would run rampant. Georges Bataille was right: excess is the accursed share of abundance, and no one can afford to bear it.

More here.

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Leann Davis Alspaugh at Acroteria:

Impressionism has become as cozy and comfortable as a favorite shirt. We know and love its Parisian vistas with bourgeois ladies and gentlemen, its sunlit gardens, and those water­lilies. We have even grown accustomed to, if not always at ease with, Post-Impressionism and its lurid colors and ladies of questionable virtue. But every so often it helps to be reminded that at one time, Impressionism was the avant-garde, the very term an insult leveled by affronted critics who saw its artists as grotesques and its artworks as evidence of impending societal collapse.

Consider just three works in the first gallery of “The Impressionist Revolution” at the Frist Art Museum, Nashville: Édouard Manet’s Brioche with Pears (1876), Camille Pissarro’s Place du Théâtre Français: Fog Effect (1897), and Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s bronze Mother and Child (1915/1928). Almost the only quality that these works share is materiality—the crusty brioche, the Parisian pea-soup fog, the evidence of the artist’s hand across the bronze surface. The daring rejection of the Academy in so many idiosyncratic ways was like a spray of absinthe in the face of the critics.

More here.

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Matthew L. Wald at The EcoModernist:

Bulldozers are already pushing dirt, welders are connecting steel reinforcing bars, concrete mixers are spinning, electricity customers are signing mega-deals for power from reactors for decades into the future, and billions of dollars of construction is already underway for a nuclear resurgence. It looks a bit like a replay of the 1970s.

But it isn’t. People understand that a nuclear resurgence means new reactors, but that doesn’t describe how radically different this round will be.

In the construction campaign that built the fleet we have now, there were essentially two choices: buy a reactor that boils water, or one that heats it without boiling. Make it as big as you can. And the choices were made by traditional utilities.

Now a new cast of players is poised to be builders and owners, almost any size is possible, and the medium being heated may not be water.

The who, what, where, when, how and even the why of nuclear have changed. Here is a rundown of the key elements of a nuclear resurgence.

More here.

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Francis Fukuyama at Persuasion:

It is clear that we are living through a dramatic revolution in warfare brought about by changes in technology. Classic airpower, manned by human pilots, is increasingly being displaced by pilotless drones and ballistic missiles. This has led to surprising developments, as seemingly weaker powers like Ukraine and Iran have been able to stymie larger ones like Russia and the United States.

Over the last several weeks, the mainstream media has begun picking up on the fact that Ukraine has been doing much better on the battlefield, and that the war with Russia may at long last be turning in its favor. But some of the claims about the underlying technological revolution have been exaggerated, and we need to understand the precise ways in which warfare is changing.

More here.

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From Smithsonian Magazine:

An elderly woman, dressed in a patterned green and white sari, ascends a rugged, blue-painted staircase in what appears to be a courtyard or interior space in Jodhpur, India. The walls and steps are all painted in a deep, vibrant blue, characteristic of the city’s old quarter. Sunlight streams down from above and to the right, illuminating the woman and casting dramatic highlights and shadows on the textured walls. A doorway leads to another blue-walled area below, and various household buckets and containers are visible near the bottom of the stairs.

More here.

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Stephanie DeMarco in The Scientist:

Macrophages may be best known as the first responders of the immune system, and the ones that reside in the liver are no different. They protect the liver from infections, but when liver cells start to accumulate fat, these macrophages can become activated and contribute to the chronic inflammatory condition, metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease (MASLD).¹

MASLD ranges in severity from simple fat buildup called metabolic dysfunction-associated steatosis (MASL) to chronic inflammation and fibrosis called metabolic dysfunction-associated steatohepatitis (MASH), which can progress to cirrhosis and liver cancer, eventually necessitating a liver transplant. While mouse models have helped scientists better understand the different ways macrophage populations contribute to the progression of MASLD, they have led to oversimplified models due to differences between mice and humans.

More here.

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We Alone

We alone can devalue gold
by not caring
if it falls or rises
in the marketplace.
Wherever there is gold
there is a chain, you know,
and if your chain
is gold
so much the worse
for you.

Feathers, shells
and sea-shaped stones
are all as rare.

This could be our revolution:
To love what is plentiful
as much as
what is scarce.

by Alice Walker
from Her Blue Body Everything We Know
Harcourt, Inc. 1996

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Steven Poole at The Guardian:

The great Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, who translated William Faulkner, André Gide, Franz Kafka and Virginia Woolf into Spanish, drew the line at Shakespeare. Speaking of the moment when Hamlet asks the ghost why it returns to haunt “the glimpses of the moon”, Borges commented: “I don’t think it can be translated. Perhaps the words can be translated. Certainly Shakespeare cannot be translated. ‘The glimpses of the moon’ means exactly ‘the glimpses of the moon’.”

All, however, is not lost. “It has been said that Shakespeare cannot be translated into any other language,” Borges added. “But Shakespeare cannot be translated into English, either, since he wrote what [Robert Louis] Stevenson called ‘that amazing dialect, the Shakespeare-ese’.” This might not be entirely true, as the translator Daniel Hahn points out in this superbly diverting book. Recalling a hip-hop production of Romeo and Juliet he once saw, he persuades us instantly that “the phrase ‘Do you kiss your teeth at me, fam?’ proved to be a perfect translation of ‘Do you bite your thumb at us, sir?’”

And if into English, then why not into Portuguese, or French, or Māori?

More here.

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Gina Kolata at the New York Times:

In a small, preliminary study, an experimental gene-editing treatment dramatically lowered cholesterol levels, perhaps permanently, after just one infusion, scientists reported on Monday.

If confirmed in larger studies, researchers hope the findings may lead to a one-and-done way to prevent heart disease in large numbers of people. Most gene therapies target rare diseases, but cardiovascular disease kills nearly 800,000 Americans a year.

“We have these debates and new guidelines that we should be treating people earlier,” said Dr. John H. P. Alexander, a cardiologist at Duke University who was not involved with the study. “A curative therapy would change the game.”

More here.

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For an essay based on this lecture, go here.

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Noah Smith at Noahpinion:

Sometimes it’s hard to keep track of everything Trump is doing to tear down the America I grew up in. In his first term, it was often said that he avoided criticism using a “DDOS” strategy — rhetorically attacking so many opponents at such blinding speed that they couldn’t focus on any one outrage for long. In his second term, the DDOS is actual policy; Trump inflicts real damage on such a broad array of U.S. institutions, with such incredible speed, that the news can’t keep track of them all.

To illustrate this, I decided to write a post about three mostly unrelated pieces of Trumpian insanity:

• • The assault on international tech industry employees and founders
  • The disastrous Iran War
  • Trump’s unprecedented corruption

Either the second or the third of these would have been a presidency-ending disaster for Barack Obama, George W. Bush, or Bill Clinton, while the first would have alienated broad swaths of the business community. But for Trump, it’s just business as usual. The stories crowd each other out of the headlines, and everyone just sort of gets overloaded and starts tuning out the news. Trump’s approval ratings drift slowly downward, but nothing else really happens.

More here.

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Fatima Bhutto in The Guardian:

We can all agree that the internet today, especially two particular platforms owned by the world’s greatest megalomaniacs, is a hellscape. But if you think X and Facebook are purgatories of friendless trolls endlessly posting hate and bullying women, each other and minorities under the guise of free speech, wait till you experience the Indian version of that netherworld, as captured by novelist and poet Meena Kandasamy. Take the worst algorithms in the world, add a billion-and-a-half people, mix in a far-right government with advanced internet skills and bring on the “burning ghats of Indian politics” that include caste and misogyny as well as roiling ethnic and religious antagonisms, and the western version of X begins to look like a children’s playground.

This is the world that Amy Chaturvedi, a posh student activist-communist living in London, wakes up to one day when the internet is set ablaze by a deepfake sex tape. It’s her face, but it’s not her. Don’t get her wrong, Amy is sexually unapologetic and proudly experimental; she has done plenty of transgressive things, she just didn’t do that one video. But try telling that to the Indian manosphere or, in fact, Amy’s mother.

More here.

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RJ Mackenzie in Nature:

For decades, researchers have raised concerns about the reliability of eyewitness testimony in criminal cases. Memories can be flawed, degraded, biased and contaminated. These problems are often intensified by unsound or inconsistent methods used by the police when eyewitness accounts are first taken. For many scientists in the field, memory is simply not to be trusted.

But the science of memory has been shifting. A re-evaluation of real-world criminal cases and laboratory experiments suggests that an eyewitness’s confidence in a specific memory can be a strong indicator of the veracity of their account, at least in certain circumstances.

More here.

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Against Order

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Maggie Slepian at Longreads:

In the beginning, this was a field. It was also riparian zones and shrubland, deciduous forest, and grassland. Long before I-90 bisected the valley and four-lane arteries divided neighborhoods into a sprawling suburban grid, this valley was a high-traffic wildlife corridor where elk, pronghorn, wolves, and hundreds of bird species moved unencumbered between the mountain ranges. Today, a checkerboard of subdivisions crosses east to west, and the remaining grasslands are buried each day under reeking asphalt and rolls of turfgrass.

The wild green of the valley has been replaced with monotonous turfgrass squares that have changed little in appearance since the 18th century, when American landowners first tried to mimic the manicured grounds of English aristocracy. The lawn as we know it is a direct result of these manufactured social standards, which Virginia Scott Jenkins calls “examples of conspicuous consumption” in her book The Lawn: A History of an American Obsession. A tidy green carpet in front of each house established a clear boundary between well-off homeowners and those without the resources to maintain their property.

Yet, monoculture lawns affect us more than their serene uniformity suggests.

More here.

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