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Christian Lorentzen at Bookforum:

THE PATERNITY OF Hicks McTaggart—defender of dames, dodger of bombs, twirler of spaghetti, the amiable behemoth hero of Thomas Pynchon’s Shadow Ticket who prowls the streets of Depression-era Milwaukee—is a question his author leaves open. His mother, Grace, and her sister, Peony, “grew up in the Driftless Area, a patch of Wisconsin never visited by glaciers, so that its terrain tends to be a little less flat and ground down than the rest of the state, free of the rubble, known as drift, that glaciers leave behind.” (Despite its charming name, the Driftless Area is a real place, not a Pynchonian invention.) Once old enough to hitchhike (“Soon as they could figure out how to bring their thumbs out of their mouths and into the wind”), Grace and Peony started consorting with circus performers wintering in Baraboo, a town at the Driftless Area’s northeastern edge, before making their way to Milwaukee to take ordinary jobs and marry ordinary men. Grace’s marriage to Eddie McTaggart was interrupted by the discovery of her ongoing affair with Max, a German elephant trainer back in Baraboo. Eddie skipped town and headed west, never to be heard from again. Of Max we are told: “When other boys got sentimental they talked about all the children you were going to have, with Max it was more likely to be elephants.”

more here.

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I’m sorry I want to say

and greenhouse and topsoil and basil greens
and cowshit and snowfall and spinach knife
and woodsmoke and watering can and common thistle

and potato digger and peach trees
and poison parsnip and romaine hearts
and rockpiles and spring trilliums and ramp circles

what song of grassblade
what creak of dark rustle tree
and blueblack wind from the north

this vetch this grapevine
this waterhose this mosspatch

sunflower gardens in the lowland
dog graves between the apple trees

this fistfull of onion tops
this garlic laid silent in the barn
this green this green this green

sweet cucumber leaf
sweet yellow bean

and all this I try to make a human shape
the darkness regenerating a shadow of a limb

my tongue embraces the snap pea
and so it is sweet

how does the rusted golfcart in the chickweed
inform my daily breath

I’m sorry I want to say
to the unhearing spaces
between the dogwood trees

for my tiny little life
I have pressed into
your bruising green skin

by Lucy Walker
from Pank Magazine

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Victoria Wohl at Aeon Magazine:

The history of nothing in Western philosophy is long and varied. Philosophers have distinguished between different kinds of nothing (what is not absolutely, not a specific something, not real, etc): its vagueness is part of the fecundity of the concept. They have treated it as a problem of theology (the heretical idea that everything may come not from God, but from nothing); of ethics (for Jean-Paul Sartre, nothingness is the precondition of human freedom); and of logic, as when Bertrand Russell scandalously conceded the logical existence of negative facts.

Above all, speaking nothing has been a problem of ontology, the systematic discourse (logos in ancient Greek) of beings (onta) and of being (on). Ontology is the study not of this or that particular being but of being in general: not just every material and conceptual entity in the world but the essence (from the Latin esse, ‘to be’) that unites them all and allows us to say of each one that it ‘is’. Ontology asks: what actually exists and how do we know? An investigation of fundamental reality, it also opens onto questions about language and thought and their access to (or obstruction of) that reality – that is, the relation between logos and onta.

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Ian Battaglia in Chicago Review of Books:

Despite the fact nearly no one knows her true identity, Elena Ferrante needs perhaps no introduction. The prolific and reclusive Italian writer has been writing since 1992, but reached international fame with My Brilliant Friend, the first of the Neapolitan Quartet of novels. It was the skillful hand of translator Ann Goldstein who helped introduce the novels to an English-reading audience. Though she was an integral part of one of the most popular works of fiction in the 21st century, Goldstein tells me she became a translator “accidentally,” after having studied Italian while working in the copy editing department of the New Yorker.

While no one could’ve predicted the extent of the Neopolitan Quartet’s popularity, there is a universality to the novels that clearly resonated with a wide swath of readers. Across the work’s roughly 1,500 pages, we follow the lives of two friends, the narrator Elena and her friend Raffaella (mostly called Lila in the novel) as their lives unfold from 1950s Naples and into the 2010s. Ten years after the release of the fourth and final book, Europa Editions is releasing a new deluxe edition of the work, collected in one volume, perhaps as it was always meant to be.

More here.

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Matthew Hutson in Nature:

Are AIs capable of murder?

That’s a question some artificial intelligence (AI) experts have been considering in the wake of a report published in June by the AI company Anthropic. In tests of 16 large language models (LLMs) — the brains behind chatbots — a team of researchers found that some of the most popular of these AIs issued apparently homicidal instructions in a virtual scenario. The AIs took steps that would lead to the death of a fictional executive who had planned to replace them.

That’s just one example of apparent bad behaviour by LLMs. In several other studies and anecdotal examples, AIs have seemed to ‘scheme’ against their developers and users — secretly and strategically misbehaving for their own benefit. They sometimes fake following instructions, attempt to duplicate themselves and threaten extortion. Some researchers see this behaviour as a serious threat, whereas others call it hype. So should these episodes really cause alarm, or is it foolish to treat LLMs as malevolent masterminds?

More here.

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Jennifer Szalai in the New York Times:

As Jeff Chang puts it in “Water Mirror Echo,” his exuberant new book about Lee as both a celebrity and an Asian American, the restless actor oscillated between “follow-the-flow Zen surrender” and “sunset-chasing American ambition.” Chang gets his title from a portion of a Taoist classic, “The Liezi,” that Lee found striking enough to transcribe:

If nothing within you stays rigid,
Outward things will disclose themselves.
Moving, be like water.
Still, be like a mirror.
Respond like an echo.

Sound advice, but for an Asian American trying to break into Hollywood, maintaining such equanimity was easier said than done. Chang, whose books include “Can’t Stop Won’t Stop,” a history of hip-hop’s early years, has written a capacious and entertaining account of Lee’s life and times. Lee, who was 32 when he suddenly died, was hard to pin down, in all senses of the word. Chang has rummaged through the archives and interviewed Lee’s surviving family members and friends; he writes with the diligence of a scholar and the propulsive energy of a fan.

More here.

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Bill Drexel in The New Atlantis:

AI systems’ mastery of language may or may not portend a future of superintelligent AI minds, but it already provides a proof of concept for a revolution in gene editing. And though such a revolution promises to unlock transformative medical advancements, it also brings longstanding bioethical dilemmas to the fore: Should people of means be able to hardwire physical or cognitive advantages into their genomes, or their children’s? Where is the line between medical therapy and dehumanizing enhancements?

Just as AI precipitates these morally fraught capabilities, the geopolitical race for AI dominance is upending the historic monopoly that Western nations have had in shaping international bioethical norms. China’s remarkable progress in AI, along with its demonstrated willingness to experiment with genetically enhancing its population, raise the possibility that a totalitarian state with profoundly different ethical standards from our own will have at least equal say in determining the future of genetic engineering.

More here.

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Alex Clark in The Guardian:

What happens when an internationally bestselling historian, a Nobel peace prize-winning journalist and a former politician get together to discuss the state of the world, and where we’re heading? Yuval Noah Harari is an Israeli medieval and military historian best known for his panoramic surveys of human history, including Sapiens, Homo Deus and, most recently, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI. Maria Ressa, joint winner of the Nobel peace prize, is a Filipino and American journalist who co-founded the news website Rappler. And Rory Stewart is a British academic and former Conservative MP, writer and co-host of The Rest Is Politics podcast. Their conversation ranged over the rise of AI, the crisis in democracy and the prospect of a Trump-Putin wedding, but began by considering a question central to all of their work: how to live a good life in an increasingly fragmented and fragile world?

YNH People have been arguing about this for thousands of years. The main contribution of modern liberalism and democracy was to try to agree to disagree; that different people can have very different concepts of what a good life is, and they can still live together in the same society, agreeing on some very basic rules of conduct.

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Seth Harp in Harper’s Magazine:

After the midair collision in January over the Potomac River between an Army helicopter and a regional jet packed with young figure skaters and their parents flying out of Wichita, Kansas, and considering the ongoing travails of the Boeing Company, which saw at least five of its airplanes crash last year, I was so concerned about the state of U.S. aviation that, when called on by this magazine to attend President Donald Trump’s military parade in Washington, on June 14, 2025, I decided to drive all the way from my home in Austin, Texas, even though it cost me two days behind the wheel and a gas bill as expensive as a plane ticket.

I was no less concerned about the prospect of standing on the National Mall on the day of the parade, a celebration of the two-hundred-fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the U.S. Army, which happened to coincide with Trump’s seventy-ninth birthday. The forecast predicted appropriately foul weather for the occasion, and there would be a number of helicopters, of both modern and Vietnam-era vintage, flying over the parade grounds. The Army’s recent track record didn’t bode well for those positioned under the flight path. In the past two years, there had been at least twenty-four serious accidents involving helicopters and nineteen fatalities, culminating with the collision over the Potomac, the deadliest incident in American commercial aviation since 2001.

More here.

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Meet Cute in Menlo Park

“Please don’t close the door to our future”
                                                   – The Jackson 5

I see my father—a thirteen-year-old boy in a tie
and slacks approaching a girl, my mother.

He holds a shoebox full of rocks. The fog
has just burned off the morning—
leaving the day bright and dry. Do you want
to see what I found? he asks her.

The other neighborhood children play cops
and robbers—dodging bullets
and putting the bad guys in handcuffs
at the shore of the bay. I know my mother

was skinny (like my sister) and her mother
would go weeks without re-pressing
her hair—so her edges must be beginning
to bloom back into afro.

Why do you dress so funny, like a pastor? she asks.
I see her looking at her jeans that fray
down the pants leg, and the green Chuck
Taylors—see her feel a new hole wearing
into the sole of them.

My mama always wants her children to look nice, he says.
She counters, Well, you look like you just got out
of church. They both laugh.

Their story begins much like it ends—with children
trying to understand pain, curious to feel
any kind of love.

Is it fair for me to tell you what will become
of these children?

In this moment, my father must think of only one thing:
the gap, still widening, between my mother’s teeth
as he opens the box to an assortment
of wet pillars of earth.

My mother reaches out to touch the collection,
her fingers moving across a red one—flat,
smooth, and marbled. You can have it, if you want,
my father says. She smiles. What’s your name?

Timothy Hughes, he says.
  I’m Kimmy, pastor Hughes

by Erica Hughes
from 3Cents Magazine

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Leo Kim at Noema Magazine:

According to the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, the 20th century’s form of life also began with the air. Sloterdijk puts the moment at 6 p.m. on April 22, 1915, near Ypres, when a German regiment under the command of Col. Max Peterson unleashed chlorine gas in warfare for the first time. Previously, violence in war had been directed at the human body; this attack targeted the “living organism’s immersion in a breathable milieu,” as Sloterdijk writes in “Terror From The Air.” “Instead of aiming at the soldiers … it targeted the air.” As troops were engulfed by this deadly atmosphere, they began to foam at the mouth, spit blood and die. What was once a background feature of the environment was thus “explicated,” transformed into a discrete resource that could be mobilized toward strategic ends.

Sloterdijk urges us to recognize how air is materialized as functional, extractable, manipulable, subject to human intervention. By situating the birth of the 20th century in this moment of terror, he suggests that we are not the inheritors of Boyle’s experimental worldview as much as Col. Peterson’s instrumentalized, manipulated, weaponized air.

more here.

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From Nature:

The drug discovery and development landscape is plagued by inefficiency, risk and astronomical cost. Clinical success rates languish below 10%, convoluted in- and out-licensing workflows erode precious patent life, and industry estimates suggest that biopharma companies write off some $15 billion every year on deprioritized candidates. At the same time, more than 90% of oncology drugs—and a significant proportion of all therapeutics—will lose patent exclusivity within the next five years, creating a looming innovation shortfall. Partex is here to bridge that gap. As the world’s largest artificial intelligence (AI)-driven drug-asset manager, Partex supercharges pipelines, resurrects shelved compounds and slashes development time to clinic—revolutionizing discovery and development at every step.

From data ocean to drug assets

At the heart of Partex lies an unparalleled ocean of real-time data—650 terabytes of public sources, 270 terabytes of proprietary studies and more than 2 million de-identified patient records—which are continuously updated and fully auditable (Fig. 1). More than 200 specialized AI models roam this data landscape, rapidly delivering actionable insights across the entire research and development (R&D) continuum.

More here.

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Robert M. Ehrenreich and Alexandra M. Lord at JSTOR Daily:

Open one of the drawers in a collections cabinet at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and you’ll find a small booklet of Efka cigarette papers. The papers are part of a broader story the museum tells about Nazism, corporate collaboration, and wartime propaganda.

But walk just a half mile across the National Mall to the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, and you’ll find a very different story about this particular artifact. At the Smithsonian, Efka rolling papers are part of a collection of objects associated with the use of marijuana and the counterculture movement of the 1960s and 1970s in the United States.

How did these objects come to tell two such diametrically opposed stories?

After World War II, German companies aggressively worked to whitewash their Nazi past and rebrand themselves. By the 1960s and 1970s, as the youth market exploded and memories of war faded, advertising campaigns for German companies such as Volkswagen promoted their products as symbols of the counterculture. Across America, young men and women strapped on their Birkenstocks, hopped into their VW Beetles, and rolled a joint with Efka papers—all before heading off to protest what they often described as “American fascism.”

more here.

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Emma Cline in The Paris Review:

Italy is not always the salvation of English-speaking people—but it does often seem that way. In film, in literature, in food, it’s the place where you go to find yourself. The real you, the one whose blazing depths have been obscured by the cold crust of convention. In The Enchanted April—the 1922 bestseller that turned Positano into a tourist destination—Elizabeth von Arnim suggested that the Mediterranean climate could burn off the impurities of the English soul, as if by a kind of Italian alchemy. English travelers from Byron to E. M. Forster advanced a similar sort of travel magic as a means for getting in touch with one’s soul. Keats, wracked with tuberculosis, went to Italy hoping to save his life.

While the sunny views may have limited curative powers, Italy, for the traveler not coughing blood onto their bedsheets, still seems to promise a kinder, more elemental world. Especially in contrast to the modern gray drizzle of England: in Rachel Cusk’s memoir of her family’s months in Italy, the decision to bolt from their Bristol suburb is prompted by an ad on the street with the tagline “Is there more to life than this?”

Well, is there?

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Coleen Murphy in Nature:

Super Agers, by clinician Eric Topol, has just been published, but it was almost surreal for me as a US scientist to read the book now, with its optimistic take on the state of the medical field. Despite their extreme promise, many of the lines of research that Topol describes have been subject to funding cuts by the Trump administration since the book was written. For example, although Super Agers argues that we are on the verge of treating a host of diseases — from viral infections, such as influenza, HIV and rabies, to tuberculosis and several types of cancer — using the mRNA technology underlying COVID-19 vaccines, that sort of research is now on the chopping block in the United States.

Nevertheless, Topol has assembled an admirable and comprehensive review of cutting-edge approaches to tackling many illnesses that cut human lives short. He explains each disease and the current state of treatments — including an impressive overview of ongoing and recently completed clinical trials — and explores future possibilities. These include advances in CRISPR gene editing and stem-cell techniques aimed at treating blood disorders, cancers, Alzheimer’s disease and more. He covers an immense amount of material in an accessible manner, and has well-supported recommendations for readers.

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Adam Mastroianni at Experimental History:

I meet a lot of people who don’t like their jobs, and when I ask them what they’d rather do instead, about 75% say something like, “Oh, I dunno, I’d really love to run a little coffee shop.” If I’m feeling mischievous that day, I ask them one question: “Where would you get the coffee beans?”

If that’s a stumper, here are some followups:

• • Which kind of coffee mug is best?
  • How much does a La Marzocco espresso machine cost?
  • Would you bake your blueberry muffins in-house or would you buy them from a third party?
  • What software do you want to use for your point-of-sale system? What about for scheduling shifts?
  • What do you do when your assistant manager calls you at 6am and says they can’t come into work because they have diarrhea?

The point of the Coffee Beans Procedure is this: if you can’t answer those questions, if you don’t even find them interesting, then you should not open a coffee shop, because this is how you will spend your days as a cafe owner. You will not be sitting droopy-lidded in an easy chair, sipping a latte and greeting your regulars as you page through Anna Karenina. You will be running a small business that sells hot bean water.

The Coffee Beans Procedure is a way of doing what psychologists call unpacking.

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Anil Ananthaswamy in Quanta:

Here’s a test for infants: Show them a glass of water on a desk. Hide it behind a wooden board. Now move the board toward the glass. If the board keeps going past the glass, as if it weren’t there, are they surprised? Many 6-month-olds are, and by a year, almost all children have an intuitive notion of an object’s permanence, learned through observation. Now some artificial intelligence models do too.

Researchers have developed an AI system that learns about the world via videos and demonstrates a notion of “surprise” when presented with information that goes against the knowledge it has gleaned.

The model, created by Meta and called Video Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture (V-JEPA), does not make any assumptions about the physics of the world contained in the videos. Nonetheless, it can begin to make sense of how the world works.

More here.

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