Jazz Monroe at Pitchfork:
The story of “Human Behaviour” as we know it begins in 1993, when Björk swanned into London in a fluffy white mohair jacket. She was 27 and ready for adventure, so utterly international she could barely eat anything but curries, still high on her late-’80s supply of rave awakenings at all-nighters by DJs with names like Mixmaster Morris.
Björk saw through the idiot elements of British culture but decided to love it anyway, most of all its charismatic mavericks and prankster producers and the anything-goes musicians she took on tour under the banner of Immigrants United. Her creative soulmates were 808 State’s Graham Massey and Debut producer Nellee Hooper, whom she had found “too good taste, too expensive-sounding” for her industrial-techno soul, before he quelled her sophistiphobia by showing how rave and hip-hop beats might coexist with her voice in the plastic paradise of ’90s pop. “Human Behaviour” was Björk’s formal debut, the salvo of an album so buccaneering and multivalent it could have been called Polygenic. Originally written in her sardonic teens, the song and its lyrics fit the perspective of an outsider arriving in a big city: A child (or in some tellings, an animal) utters conspiratorial warnings to a confidante, marvelling at the oddballs of adultkind.
more here.
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Another bout of Gothic fever in the early twentieth century revolved less around a style than around a restless Gothic energy, an overwrought Gothic sensibility. In 1921 the German art historian Hermann Schmitz remarked that calling something Gothic had become the highest form of praise: a dancer on Berlin’s Kurfürstendamm might be complimented for the Gothic line of her movements, an Expressionist painting for its Gothic feeling. Schmitz bemoaned this misappropriation of the “most glorious legacy of the pious and pure spirit of our forefathers.” Seen as German by Germans and as French by the French, the Gothic was revered by those yearning for a lost age of faith and unity as well as by avant-gardes in search of the new.
Bhalla picked up the mantle from his predecessor Mayor Dawn Zimmer, launching a 
The Trump White House yesterday posted a manipulated photo of Nekima Levy Armstrong, a Minnesota civil rights attorney who was arrested after protesting in a church where a pastor is allegedly also an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) official.
On Jan. 13, Vermont legislator Troy Headrick (I) 
AI Will Accelerate the Regulatory Pipeline
Kristalina Georgieva told delegates in Davos that the IMF’s own research suggested there would be a big transformation of demand for skills, as the technology becomes increasingly widespread.
Picture a fall afternoon in Austin, Texas. The city is experiencing a sudden rainstorm, common there in October. Along a wet and darkened city street drive two robotaxis. Each has passengers. Neither has a driver.
I must begin with a condition rather than a confession: my safety, anonymity and physical survival come first. In Iran, where words can still wound the body, this text is written cautiously, stripped of names and coordinates – anything that could invite harm. What follows is not testimony in the juridical sense, nor reportage. It is a personal record: fragile, partial, and deliberately inward. This is not about who I am in an administrative sense, but about where I stand.
I
Parent less, play more.
People who experience kidney failure need either lifelong dialysis or a transplant to survive. Yet even for those lucky enough to get a transplant, that is by no means the end of the story. Kidneys from deceased donors last an average of 10 to 15 years, those from a living person 20 to 25. If (or rather, when) a transplant fails, the affected patient once again needs dialysis or a donated organ.
There is a scene in the movie version of Carl Sagan’s book Contact where the main character, an astronomer who has detected the first radio signal from an alien civilization, is being considered for the role of humanity’s representative to meet the aliens. The international panel interviewing her asks, “If you could ask [the aliens] just one question, what would it be?” Her reply is: “I’d ask them, ‘How did you do it? How did you evolve, how did you survive this technological adolescence without destroying yourself?” When I think about where humanity is now with AI—about what we’re on the cusp of—my mind keeps going back to that scene, because the question is so apt for our current situation, and I wish we had the aliens’ answer to guide us. I believe we are entering a rite of passage, both turbulent and inevitable, which will test who we are as a species. Humanity is about to be handed almost unimaginable power, and it is deeply unclear whether our social, political, and technological systems possess the maturity to wield it.