Paul Grimstad at The Baffler:
There is an especially gnarly chapter more than halfway through Ulysses called the “Oxen of the Sun” in which Joyce’s weirdly adversarial virtuosity takes the form of a pastiche of the evolution of English prose, which is at the same time an allegory of the nine months of fetal gestation (the chapter is set in a maternity hospital). It is mostly a slog, but it is an exhilarating slog. As you hack your way through Joyce “doing” Malory and Bunyan and Swift and Pepys and Defoe and Sterne and Goldsmith and Burke and Gibbon and Lamb and De Quincey and Carlyle and Pater, and on up to “Irish, Bowery slang and broken doggerel,” a part of your reading mind succumbs to a serenely disbelieving loop: He did this. He did this. If “Oxen” occupies a region of Ulysses where Joyce’s exquisite ear for memorably musical sentences (“Mild fire of wine kindled his veins”) takes a back seat to the leaden hum of meta-literature, that is no reason not to be awed by his chutzpah.
Michael Lentz’s Schattenfroh—rendered heroically from German into English by Max Lawton—lives mostly on the nether side of the line Joyce crossed in “Oxen.” At one thousand pages it is almost by definition a slog.
more here.
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We think the current evidence is clear. By inference to the best explanation — the same reasoning we use in attributing general intelligence to other people — we are observing AGI of a high degree. Machines such as those envisioned by Turing have arrived. Similar arguments have been made before, and have engendered controversy and push-back. Our argument benefits from substantial advances and extra time. As of early 2026, the case for AGI is considerably more clear-cut.
NEW YORK — A Doberman pinscher named Penny was awarded best in show at the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show on Tuesday night, the fifth of its breed to take the title of top dog. “You can’t attribute it to one thing, but she’s as great a Doberman as I’ve ever seen,” said her handler, Andy Linton, who previously won best in show 37 years ago and had hoped for a second victory, adding, “I had some goals, and this was one of them.”
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Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky’s joint papers from the 1970s and 1980s have inspired many, including myself. These articles magically turned statistical thinking—previously a niche interest—into a major re-search focus. Kahneman and Tversky revived the concept of heuristics, which had largely been forgotten at the time, and played a pivotal role in bringing psychology to the attention of economics and other social sciences. I was also deeply influenced by Tversky’s seminal work on the foundations of measurement, which inspired my first book on modeling.
On Jan. 28, 2026, President Donald Trump sharply intensified his threats to the Islamic Republic, suggesting that if Tehran did not agree to a set of demands, he could mount an attack “
The adventure story and the historical romance were two genres at which Stevenson excelled, but he was also brilliant at the macabre psychological parable in his novella The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), and the supernatural in his short story “Thrawn Janet” (1881). The first of these takes on the very “fortress of identity” (in Jekyll’s words) that has so obsessed us of late but turns it into something timeless. Damrosch tells us that the novella caused a furious argument between Stevenson and his wife, in which she comes off better than he does. When Louis read aloud his first draft, as Fanny’s son Lloyd recalled, “Her praise was constrained; the words seemed to come with difficulty; and then all at once she broke out with criticism. He had missed the point, she said; had missed the allegory; had made it merely a story—a magnificent bit of sensationalism—when it should have been a masterpiece.” Damrosch continues, “Fanny’s point was that Louis had ruined the story by turning it into a mere tale about a secret life. . . . What was needed was not just a character wearing a disguise, but something far more profound: a character struggling with a deeper hidden self that breaks loose and fights for supremacy.” Louis resisted, then came around, went back to work, and gave her the masterpiece she wanted. Thereafter, he jokingly referred to her as “the critic on the hearth.”
Popular wisdom holds we can ‘rewire’ our brains: after a stroke, after trauma, after learning a new skill, even with 
Creativity is a trait that AI critics say is likely to remain the preserve of humans for the foreseeable future. But a large-scale study finds that leading generative language models can now exceed the average human performance on linguistic creativity tests.
So I was thinking about the old logic problem/koan
Dr Johnson never filmed a “spicy books with cartoon covers” vlog. But Jack Edwards cannot quite deny being the most important literary critic in the world. In commercial terms, he certainly is. A nod from him fills bathtubs, train carriages and public parks with copies of a book he likes. Booksellers buy and arrange their stock to his taste. And he is not confined to new releases. When he dug up an obscure Dostoevsky (White Nights), his positive review moved it from cellars to shop windows instantaneously. I first met him for this interview around the time of the 2024 International Booker Prize. He had been asked to host the ceremony – and to livestream it. I watched him cruise up the red carpet, encircled by cameras and attendants.
The backstory: a few months ago, Anthropic released Claude Code, an exceptionally productive programming agent. A few weeks ago, a user modified it into Clawdbot, a generalized lobster-themed AI personal assistant. It’s free, open-source, and “empowered” in the corporate sense – the designer