Vauhini Vara at The Atlantic:

The scandal started the usual way. Readers noticed AI-like prose in a written work and took to ridiculing it online. Some ran the writing through an AI-detection platform that labeled it entirely AI-generated. The institutions involved in its publication scrambled to figure out what had happened.

The details in this particular scandal have to do with an all-but-unknown Trinidadian writer named Jamir Nazir. His story “The Serpent in the Grove” was among five regional winners of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. The award came with 2,500 British pounds and publication on the website of Granta, a prestigious British literary magazine. Earlier this week, readers started gleefully tearing Nazir’s work apart online, posting screenshots showing canned stylistic patterns and a proliferation of weird metaphors: “Her hair is midnight rain; her laugh is bright as zinc,” read one line.

“A major milestone for AI, at any rate,” one person deadpanned. Subsequent sleuthing only reinforced the early suspicions: The photo of Nazir on the prize website was almost too slick-looking; his LinkedIn page was filled with florid posts about AI’s potential to change the world.

Before long, commenters were pointing fingers at two other winners of this year’s Commonwealth Prize: Malta’s John Edward DeMicoli and India’s Sharon Aruparayil.

More here.

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Daniel Bessner at The Ideas Letter:

The Donald J. Trump Administration’s war against Iran has renewed talk about the role the United States should play in the world. While in recent American history, public support for US wars has been relatively high in the first days of a conflict, only 41 percent of Americans supported the Iran War when it began, and these numbers have remained low. This lack of support is evidence of a broad shift in US public opinion away from kneejerk support for hegemony: Americans, it seems, have become skeptical of their empire.

As often occurs, public opinion has tracked material reality. The statistics tell a clear story: US economic and military power is in decline. In 1980, the United States represented 21.6 percent of global GDP adjusted for purchasing power parity (PPP); by 2016, that number had dropped to 15.9 percent; by 2025, it dropped to 14.6 percent; and it is projected to drop to 13.9 percent by 2030. The same is true when one examines the G7’s share of global GDP adjusted for PPP. In 1980, the G7 countries—the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, and Japan—represented 51.9 percent of global GDP adjusted for PPP; in 2016, 32.3 percent; in 2025, 28.3 percent; and this share is expected to drop to 26.2 percent by 2030. Over the past two decades, several countries in Asia have arisen to challenge North Atlantic economic power.

More here.

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George Prochnik at Cabinet:

Just inside the tall white door of Sigmund Freud’s waiting room, with its cross-hatched metal strips evoking prison bars, stands a dark valise ready for flight. Beside the case, dropped in disarray, lies a leather camera case, straps snaking into the air, then coiling across the wooden floor. The image is the first interior shot in Edmund Engelman’s book comprising fifty-four of the photographs he took in May 1938 of Freud’s apartment building, home, and offices at Berggasse 19.¹ In the suite of pictures, this is the only one to advertise the photographer’s own presence. Perhaps the serendipitous configuration proved irresistible to him; the valise at the threshold makes a potent emblem of Freud’s impending departure from the city where he’d spent almost the whole of his life. The adjacent cast-aside camera holder, meanwhile, attests to the case’s true function—a kind of signature left by Engelman to indicate that the evidence of the resident’s imminent exit is only symbolic, just as the photographer himself is only “there” as the conservator of transience, a cipher behind the cyclops eye of the lens.

more here.

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Harmon Siegel in Artforum:

Art has never been a question of life and death.¹
—Barbara Rose

IT WAS 1968, and Barbara Rose was excoriating her Artforum colleagues in the pages of the magazine. Assassinations, riots, and wars were ripping the country apart. Yet somehow these writers were wasting their energy and talents debating how sculpture could acknowledge its dependence on the floor. Their zeal would have been appropriate “to a discussion of black power, urban renewal or war resistance.” But in a “morally and politically neutral activity like art criticism,” it was worse than absurd. It was repugnant.

Today, one rarely encounters the kind of stridency that Rose deplored in critics like Rosalind Krauss and Michael Fried, then leading voices in Artforum, not to mention the fury of Rose’s response. Not because criticism has become neutral, but because we displace its controversial debates onto questions of intention and impact. We ask about critics’ beliefs (do they have good politics?), their effects on audiences (do they make their readers better?), and their institutional positions (are they complicit with bad actors?). These arguments remain lively, even vicious. But we no longer argue about whether art as such is a matter of life and death—we assume that it’s not. Consequently, critics aren’t prompted to ask about the political valence of their own activity: Is criticism itself a moral good?

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Simon Spichak in Nature:

Acute stress makes it difficult to link memories of past events with fresh information, a study¹ suggests. The results help to explain why people struggle to show insight under pressure. The study, published today in Science Advances, combined brain imaging and psychological testing to show how stress disrupts people’s ability to tap into records of previous experiences and make deductions. The combination of behavioural testing and neural imaging “to actually see what’s going awry is really compelling”, says Brice Kuhl, a neuroscientist at the University of Oregon in Eugene, who was not involved in the study.

The brain connects new and old information to make inferences through a cognitive process called integration. For example, if you have a memory of your friend wearing a bright green jacket, and you see a bright green jacket on a park bench, you might integrate your memory and the visual input to infer that your friend is at the park. This ability can be impaired in individuals with some mental-health conditions, such as anxiety disorders and psychosis.

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Susan Choi at the Paris Review:

Barthelme was a Houstonian. To me this is the single most salient fact about him, though the competitors for that distinction are many: that he was a contemporary-art-museum director; that his childhood was spent riding in an open-top car through the undeveloped Texas prairie; that his friend and neighbor in New York City was Grace Paley; that his students called him Don B. and associated with him the powers of a mystic or shaman, if one prone to sarcasm. Barthelme was a genre unto himself, the rare writer who never wrote toward or against any previously recognized form but simply, somehow, took his own form, which is always instantly recognizable as its inept imitations are also instantly recognizable. All these qualities attest to his home city, at least for me, who shared the city with him for a while in the mid-eighties. Houston is a city of unexpected adjacencies. Because it has no zoning regulations, it has no zones. Instead, things are put places—a church, an ice house, some houses for living in, a place for strippers, a place to buy your fishing boat, a place to eat chilaquiles—in whatever way they happen to go, as if the city has said, collectively, Let’s not get too hung up on formalities, we’ve got enough room not to worry about it. Even now, Houston is a city like a prairie, its urbanity thin as a threadbare quilt tossed onto the grass, a playful indication of the urban. And this is also very Barthelme, this playing with category rather than dutifully seeking to conform, this ignoring of the very many conventions—of living, thinking, and certainly of writing—with which the rest of the world seems to unquestioningly preoccupy itself.

more here.

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Lola Seaton in Sidecar:

Ben Lerner once described Gerald Murnane’s The Plains (1982) as a ‘bizarre masterpiece that can feel less like something you’ve read than something you’ve dreamed’. Something similar could be said of Lerner’s new novel Transcription. It opens with the unnamed narrator, a Lerner-like writer, sitting backwards on a train – ‘facing the past’, as his ten-year-old daughter Eva says – and falling asleep, and it’s as though we too enter a dreamlike state. As in a dream we are engrossed without being entirely sure why, puzzled but untroubled by what we don’t understand, including the relationship, chronological and otherwise, between the juxtaposed halves of this short beguiling book.

The first, ‘Hotel Providence’, recounts a surreal evening the narrator spent with his ‘mentor’, Thomas, now ninety, whom he has come back to his college town to interview for a magazine. At his hotel he drops his phone – his only means of recording – in the sink. Walking through Providence ‘deviceless’, memories from his student days arise. It seems ‘impossible’ to admit to his screw-up so he decides they can talk in a preparatory way, then conduct the interview the following morning after he has been to the Apple Store. But the conversation gets out of hand. Thomas asks if the narrator is recording and he pretends he is, placing his broken phone on the table next to them.

More here.

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Quinn Slobodian in The Ideas Letter:

In recent years, it has become common—even unavoidable—to refer to the internet, AI, and digital capitalism in terms of empire and colonialism. A partial list of recent high-profile books that use the language includes Empire of AI (2025) by Karen Hao, Silicon Empires (2025) by Nick Srnicek, The New Empire of AI (2025) by Rachel Adams, Digital Empires (2023) by Anu Bradford, and Cloud Empires (2022) by Vili Lehdonvirta. These join influential work by Nick Couldry and Ulises Mejias in their paired books, The Costs of Connection (2019) and Data Grab (2023), and their 2018 article, “Data Colonialism,” which has over 2,000 citations on Google Scholar (note for non-academics: this is a lot). Honorable mention goes to an article on “digital colonialism” by the South African scholar Michael Kwet, which tops 1,000 citations. Hardly a week goes by without a think piece with a title like “Big Tech is Building Empires,” as the economist Grace Blakeley wrote recently, or “AI is in its empire era,” as the STS scholar Kate Crawford posted last year.

The turn to empire is notable first for displacing a previously preferred language of mind control. After Edward Snowden’s revelations in 2013 about Silicon Valley’s complicity in mass surveillance triggered the first phase of the so-called techlash, critics gravitated to language of behaviorism and anxieties about brainwashing from the mid-twentieth century. Our internet-connected phones and laptops had put us in Skinner boxes; we were the pigeons pecking at the pellets according to a pattern—at the mercy of “attention merchants” in “the shallows.” “The technology that connects us also controls us,” read the tagline for the influential Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma. Shoshana Zuboff—who had taken classes with B.F. Skinner himself as a youngster at Harvard—warned in her 2019 bestseller The Age of Surveillance Capitalism that Silicon Valley now had “the instruments and methods that can impose Skinner’s technology of behavior across the varied domains of everyday life right down to our depths.”

The shift from psychology to political geography is a good one.

More here.

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Patrick Iber in Dissent:

The 1776 Report, the pseudo-historical document Donald Trump commissioned as a rebuttal to the 1619 Project and the historical justification for his far-right agenda, contains a bizarre attack on “identity politics.” According to the document, “the modern revival of identity politics stems from mid-20th century European thinkers who sought the revolutionary overthrow of their political and social systems but were disillusioned by the working class’s lack of interest in inciting revolution.” It is Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, the report says, who argued that the “focus should not be on economic revolution as much as taking control of the institutions that shape culture.” Gramsci’s heirs in the Frankfurt School, such as Herbert Marcuse, developed identity politics, and then his disciples created critical race theory. “Following Gramsci’s strategy of taking control of the culture,” the report argues, “Marcuse’s followers use the approach of Critical Race Theory to impart an oppressor-victim narrative upon generations of Americans.”

In this telling, the movements for civil rights, women’s rights, and gay liberation are not responding to real forms of discrimination. Instead, the cultural shifts that have taken place since the 1960s can be dismissed as the influence of radical foreign Marxists who have undermined the foundational unities of American life through their control of cultural institutions. It is poor intellectual history, but powerful pseudo-history. It frees the believer from considering the demands of people facing oppression as legitimate and justifies the destruction of knowledge-producing institutions. For the right, it replaces hard questions with obfuscation, using obscurity to create a false sense of clarity.

How did we get here?

More here.

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Pranab Bardhan interviews the Norwegian economist, Karl Ove Moene:

Pranab Bardhan (PB):1. It is well-known that in most global rankings by various socio-economic indicators the Nordic countries (Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Iceland) usually come up often at the very top. In order to understand the structural reasons behind this sustained good performance of Nordic countries I have found your articles over the years very useful. People associate the Nordic countries with high taxes funding a generous welfare state and relative equality in the capital-labor relation, but they do not pay enough attention to another feature of equality that you have emphasized, that of wage equality among different workers and firms. In fact you have referred to this compression in wage structure as an important factor in preserving the dynamism of capitalism in Nordic countries in terms of innovations. If I understand you correctly, the compression results in relatively low wages facing high-productivity firms and industries comparable to those faced by their low-productivity counterparts, and this brings high profitability for the former, and thus stimulates innovations and investments in new technology. Would you briefly explain for the general reader the history of this institutional practice in Nordic countries and its operation today? Also, how is it sustained in these countries, whereas in others, say US or UK, such compression of the salaries of high-skilled workers and managers would have induced large-scale emigration?

Kalle Moene (KM): In Scandinavia, wage equality arose as adjustments to fierce international competition in output markets, starting already when social democrats came to power in the 1930s. In Sweden and Norway coordinated wage bargaining emerged from a union vs. union dispute over the bargaining system. When foreign demand collapsed during the world crisis, workers in the export sectors, particularly the metal workers, had to take large wage cuts to keep their jobs.

More here and here.

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Under a Red Sky

There was a little boy and there was a little girl
And they lived in an alley under the red sky
There was a little boy and there was a little girl
And they lived in an alley under the red sky

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James Wade at Texas Highways:

Family road trips can be complicated, especially in a state as big as Texas, where the answer to “Are we there yet?” is usually “Only a few more hours.”

With hundreds of thousands of road miles spidering out across the state, getting to a destination outside of our Central Texas home requires extensive planning and patience. But Jordan insists exploration and adventure are key to a happy childhood, and because I learned long ago that listening to my wife is, coincidentally, the key to a happy adulthood, I agreed we would bring the kids along as much as we could.

Natasha Klavon, a licensed counselor and certified mental health professional with the Bariatric Medical Institute in San Antonio, says travel can help build emotional flexibility, curiosity, and empathy in children. “It opens children up to the limitless possibilities not only of the world around them but also within themselves,” Klavon says. “It helps them develop confidence, resilience, and a deeper sense of who they are. When travel is shared with guidance, it strengthens attachment and creates meaningful, lasting core memories with connection.”

It’s the “core memories” part I’m most curious about.

More here.

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Konstantin Kakaes at Quanta:

What Albert Einstein was to 20th-century physics, Alexander Grothendieck was to 20th-century mathematics. He is much less well known because math gets technical even more quickly than physics does. But as with Einstein, Grothendieck’s impact came not just from his own results, revolutionary though they were. His work also reoriented his entire discipline in radical new directions.

Grothendieck was intense and ascetic from his early days. Starting in the early 1950s, when he was in his 20s, he produced thousands of pages of formal and informal notes that changed the course of mathematics. Then in 1970, he quit. He left his post at a prestigious research institute just outside of Paris to teach at the provincial university in Montpellier where he studied as an undergraduate. He mostly stopped talking to other mathematicians. In the early 1990s, he moved to a small village in the Pyrenees, where he lived as a hermit.

Mathematicians are still grappling with the innovations he made half a century ago.

More here.

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Ruxandra Teslo in Works in Progress:

Pancreatic cancer has the highest mortality rate of all major cancers. Although its five-year survival rate has improved from roughly 4 percent in the mid-1990s to around 13 percent today, it remains among the deadliest of all cancer types.

Survival is so poor partially because pancreatic cancer is typically diagnosed late: the pancreas sits deep in the abdomen, symptoms are vague and late to appear, and by the time most patients are diagnosed, the cancer has already spread. This feature has earned pancreatic cancer the name ‘silent killer’. Metastatic cases, where the tumor has already spread to other organs, represent more than half of all new diagnoses. For these patients in particular there has been minimal improvement in outcomes over recent decades, with just 2 to 3 percent still alive five years after their diagnosis.

More here.

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