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Jacob Posner in The Christian Science Monitor:

In a YouTube video posted by NASA, kids sit cross-legged in neat rows in a gymnasium at Sunita L. Williams Elementary School in Needham, Massachusetts. You can see them wave their little hands at the camera, which beams the image roughly 250 miles above Earth to the International Space Station. They were talking in December with none other than Sunita Williams, the school’s namesake and an astronaut living on the space station. She should have been home already. A series of technical failures extended an eight-day mission to nine months, leading some news organizations and politicians to play up tension and place blame.

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Drew Lichtenberg in The New York Times:

The new film “Hamnet” features two bright young actors, Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley, playing Shakespeare and his wife, Agnes (née Anne) Hathaway. “Hamnet” arrives already widely lauded — it won the audience award at the Toronto International Film Festival and has been sending millennial cinephiles into critical paroxysms. “Not to be hyperbolic but this movie contains the actual meaning of life,” wrote one such reviewer on Letterboxd. The film, based on Maggie O’Farrell’s best-selling novel, recasts Shakespeare’s life in the most youthful and desirable terms possible, positioning itself as a generational gateway for a reanimated obsession with the Bard.

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Ed Simon in Literary Hub:

Bibliomania, the only hobby which is also a mental health affliction. The person with piles of titles on their nightstand, in their closet, in the trunk of their car. Books in front of books on their bookshelf. “With thought, patience, and discrimination, book passion becomes the signature of a person’s character,” writes Nicholas Basbanes in A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books. “When out of control and indulged to excess, it lets loose a fury of bizarre behavior.” The sort of figure mocked in the engraving “The Bibliomaniac” from Sebastian Brandt’s 1497 satirical allegory The Ship of Fools, a work that Erasmus knew well, where he may have recognized himself in the woodcut. I certainly do, seeing a reflection of my own bookish pursuits from half-a-millennia ago in Brandt’s ridiculous figure in monastic robes and scholarly cap and eyeglasses, sitting behind a desk and shelf piled with books, the figure fanning them as if he’s their servant rather than they his possessions.

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Arianna Huffington in Time Magazine:

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Alexander Sorondo at The Metropolitan Review:

Alan Moore is 72 years old now. Since the 1980s, he’s been celebrated as the greatest writer in comics history. But he’s done with all that. Full-time novelist now. Finally. Spends his days at home just writing, reading, and smoking “frightening,” “staggering,” “saturating” amounts of weed.

“I use it to work,” as he told Alex Musson. “Always have done.”

Except these days he does it without the weekly deadlines, the phone always ringing, questions and chitchat with illustrators, coauthors, publishers, press — none of it.

Life of a novelist now. Solitude.

And he’s embarked on something new: a five-novel series called The Long London. It might not seem like a huge venture, given that Book One, The Great When (2024), reads as a fairly straightforward fantasy story, just about 300 pages, self-contained, quick-moving, irreverent.

But it marks a big change for Moore.

There’s no illustrator for this series. No coauthor. No photos to pair with the text.

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Benj Edwards at Ars Technica:

While AI bubble talk fills the air these days, with fears of overinvestment that could pop at any time, something of a contradiction is brewing on the ground: Companies like Google and OpenAI can barely build infrastructure fast enough to fill their AI needs.

During an all-hands meeting earlier this month, Google’s AI infrastructure head Amin Vahdat told employees that the company must double its serving capacity every six months to meet demand for artificial intelligence services, reports CNBC. The comments show a rare look at what Google executives are telling its own employees internally. Vahdat, a vice president at Google Cloud, presented slides to its employees showing the company needs to scale “the next 1000x in 4-5 years.”

While a thousandfold increase in compute capacity sounds ambitious by itself, Vahdat noted some key constraints: Google needs to be able to deliver this increase in capability, compute, and storage networking “for essentially the same cost and increasingly, the same power, the same energy level,” he told employees during the meeting.

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David A. Bell at The Nation:

In that classic of Western cinema, Monty Python’s Life of Brian, the title character addresses a crowd in Jerusalem that has mistaken him for Jesus Christ. “You’ve got it all wrong,” he pleads. “You don’t need to follow me. You don’t need to follow anybody. You’ve got to think for yourselves. You’re all individuals!” The crowd chants back, in unison, “Yes, we’re all individuals!” “You’re all different!” Brian protests. “Yes, we’re all different!” the crowd responds (though one lone voice insists, “I’m not”).

The scene illustrates as well as anything the problem of trying to write a history of that endlessly fascinating but endlessly slippery subject—the “self.” The self can be defined as the way people experience and understand their own individuality. The difficulty stems from the fact that the very language people use to describe and express their individuality is, like all language, something they take from and share with others. Many great historians have taken as a theme the birth of modern Western individualism, associating it with many different eras—notably, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the eras of Romanticism and high Modernism. Yet in each case, the terms in which individuals expressed their supposedly ineffable, unique identities have tended to 
sound remarkably conventional and similar, thereby undermining the historians’ case.

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Afra Wang at The Ideas Letter:

Last summer, a few American writer friends and I traveled across China on a self-organized tour of AI labs, factories, and industrial clusters. Among them was Aadil, a twenty-two-year-old Bay Area engineer who loves the Cantonese rapper SKAI ISYOURGOD and deploys Chinese memes with the fluency of someone raised on the Chinese internet, despite never having lived there.

After the trip, he wrote some reflections on his Substack:

Shenzhen is such a dope city. Legit looks like the future more than any city I’ve been to… Huaqiangbei is massive. Honestly I’m thinking about doing a month-long hardware residency there so I can crash course EE by building stuff hands on.

It is crazy how much their society grinds. It’s in their DNA. The work ethic is insane. Shenzhen was dirt and mud forty years ago and now it’s the world’s example of a cyberpunk city.

Reading his words, I felt a familiar pressure—a small internal shift I had sensed accumulating for years. I left China at 17, in 2012, arrived in the U.S., and absorbed the ambient narratives of American centrality that still held cultural authority then. I spent much of my twenties trying to construct a language that neither flattered nor demonized either country.

But seeing China through Aadil’s eyes forced me to recalibrate.

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Helen Shaw at The New Yorker:

Two actors are wriggling across the stage on their bellies. They’re earthworms, or maybe simply brothers, Cricket and Coyote, who want to become earthworms. They’re planning to write a screenplay together, and one suggests making their movie about worms. But “I thought we were writing something about what it means to come from the same root,” the other brother complains. “A movie, a Western, brothers killing men and running amuck in the desert.”

In the oozy, ontologically slapstick “Bad Stars,” written and directed by Amanda Horowitz, and produced in the experimental space the Collapsable Hole in 2025, certain correspondences emerge, particularly if the watcher is familiar with Sam Shepard’s “True West.” In that play, from 1980, two brothers, the wild Lee and the uptight Austin, also bicker about how to write a movie; they also think about “running amuck in the desert.” At the comic coup-de-théâtre climax of “True West,” a drunken Lee smashes a typewriter with a golf club, as Austin gloats over an entire fleet of toasters that he has stolen to prove his macho bonafides.

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Everything That Happens Can Be Called Aging

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Mira Jacob in Harper’s Bazaar:

From her early documentary Indian Cabaret (1985), which follows strippers through Mumbai, to her first feature film, Salaam Bombay (1988), which centers the lives of street children, to Mississippi Masala (1991), which explores prejudice between Black and Indian communities in the U.S., to Queen of Katwe (2016), which gives a glimpse into the life of Ugandan chess prodigy Phiona Mutesi, Nair has built a career on surfacing brilliant, if often overlooked, stories. Her devotion to getting into the particularities and specificities of culture, for not being swayed by an invisible audience that executives insist might not get it, has earned her a loyal following. It’s also gotten her an Academy Award nomination and the Cannes Prix d’Or and Audience Award for Salaam Bombay, the Golden Lion award for Monsoon Wedding at the Venice Film Festival, and many other prizes. It is no surprise to any of us that a son raised in her household would engender the same loyalty.

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Tom Hibbert at Discover Wildlife:

The names ‘dove’ and ‘pigeon’ can be deceptive. Scientifically speaking, neither of them carry much merit. All the birds we know as either pigeons or doves belong to the same family, Columbidae. This large group of often plump, slender-billed birds encompasses around 350 species, with five regularly found in the UK.

The name dove is usually given to the smaller members of this family. But in taxonomy (the scientific process of naming and classifying living things), there is no real distinction between a dove and a pigeon.

The stock dove is more closely related to the woodpigeon than it is the collared dove or turtle dove, and the feral pigeons in our towns are descended from rock doves. In fact, the birds we know as pigeons may even be called doves in other languages, or vice versa.

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Annalee Newitz in New Scientist:

In 1907, US historian Henry Adams first started circulating a memoir that would go on to be a smash hit in 1919: The Education of Henry Adams. Given Adams’s illustrious family – both his grandfather and great-grandfather were presidents – you might expect it to be a self-congratulatory tale of the wonders of US education.

Instead, it galvanised audiences with the bold claim that everything Adams had been taught in 19th-century schools was useless. Immersed in religious studies and the classics, he was ill-equipped for a world of mass electrification and automobiles. If education was supposed to prepare him for the future, he argued, it had failed.

Nearly 120 years later, Adams’s critique is once again relevant, especially in the US. New technologies are upending the traditional ways that students learn. The problem isn’t just the rise of AI models, though. It is also ideological. The US government is depriving universities of billions in federal funding while it demands more control over curriculums and admissions. The future of education is in chaos, but it isn’t dying; it is changing to meet the moment.

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Sneha Khedkar in The Scientist:

The development of better and more reliable artificial intelligence (AI) technologies has immense applications in the field of scientific research. AI has become a powerful extra set of eyes and hands for scientists: It can sift through heaps of data in seconds, guide experiments, and help write better manuscripts. “We’re seeing the emergence of subdisciplines that are AI plus X, where X is essentially every field of science. Neuroscience is no exception,” said Christopher Rozell, a neuroengineer at Georgia Institute of Technology, who mediated the AI press conference at the 2025 Society for Neuroscience meeting. During the session, five panelists discussed the applications of AI in biology and how machine learning can augment clinical practice and the field of neuroscience, from data analyses to clinical diagnoses.

Modified Artificial Neural Networks Offer Clues on How the Brain Integrates Sensory Information

The human brain integrates various sensory inputs to reliably perceive the surroundings.¹ “This task nowadays is also very successfully solved by artificial neural networks (ANNs), which are indeed inspired by the brain,” said Marcel Oberlaender, a neurobiologist at the Max Planck Institute for Neurobiology of Behavior.

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Jim Hanas at Mediumcool:

Hal Hartley does have a new movie out. His first feature since Ned Rifle (2014), the conclusion of the Henry Fool trilogy. Did you know that? I suspect that either you did not know that or have known it for so long that you now suspect I am a poser. (That’s what shibboleth-speakers call people who have gained, but not earned, access to the shibboleth. Tedious, but it comes with the territory.) It’s called Where to Land, he paid for it via Kickstarter—as he has for his projects since Ned Rifle—and I doubt a large audience will see it. Hartley produces and sells his own box-sets and offers his movies via streaming on his website, but the new one isn’t there yet. It had a handful of screenings at the Roxy Cinema in New York, which is where I saw it.

I loved it, and you if you like Hal Hartley, you will too. Hartley is an acquired taste, and seeing the new movie made me recall the experience of first seeing Trust (1990) and Simple Men (1992), the final two movies in his so-called Long Island Trilogy. Actors don’t exactly act in Hal Hartley movies. They say their lines and are. Robert Bresson, who preferred the term “models” to “actors” is often brought up in connection with Hartley, and while that is a good starting point, Hartley has a much lighter touch.

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