Alexander Manshel in The Nation:

The novels recognized by major literary prizes have largely abandoned the present in favor of the past. Contemporary fiction has never been less contemporary.

If we look back to the middle of the 20th century, we can see that the kinds of books that were short-listed for the Pulitzer Prize or the National Book Award then were mostly about contemporary life: J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, and a host of others by the likes of Saul Bellow, John Cheever, and John Updike. And these aren’t outliers. Between 1950 and 1980, about half of the novels short-listed for these and the National Book Critics Circle Award were set in the present, narrating “the way we live now” in all its complexity.

Fast-forward to the present, and the past has taken over. A historical novel has won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 12 out of the last 15 years, and historical fiction has made up 70 percent of all novels short-listed for these three major American prizes since the turn of the 21st century.

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Steve Nadis in Quanta:

“Neural networks are currently the most powerful tools in artificial intelligence,” said Sebastian Wetzel(opens a new tab), a researcher at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. “When we scale them up to larger data sets, nothing can compete.”

And yet, all this time, neural networks have had a disadvantage. The basic building block of many of today’s successful networks is known as a multilayer perceptron, or MLP. But despite a string of successes, humans just can’t understand how networks built on these MLPs arrive at their conclusions, or whether there may be some underlying principle that explains those results. The amazing feats that neural networks perform, like those of a magician, are kept secret, hidden behind what’s commonly called a black box.

AI researchers have long wondered if it’s possible for a different kind of network to deliver similarly reliable results in a more transparent way.

An April 2024 study(opens a new tab) introduced an alternative neural network design, called a Kolmogorov-Arnold network (KAN), that is more transparent yet can also do almost everything a regular neural network can for a certain class of problems.

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From Project Syndicate:

Kishore Mahbubani: Western diplomats must first understand how much power has shifted from Europe to Asia. In 1980, the European Union’s GDP was ten times larger than China’s. Today, the two are roughly equal. Goldman Sachs projects that China’s GDP will be nearly double that of the EU by 2050. When power shifts, behavior must change. European diplomats have become addicted to sanctions and threats. They must now break that addiction, and return to the traditional means of diplomacy: persuasion and compromise.

Also, it was foolish of NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg to suggest the expansion of NATO to Asia. NATO’s militaristic culture would pose a threat to the longstanding peace in the region. More broadly, Europeans need to change their attitude toward Asia, learning from the region, instead of lecturing it.

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Alexander Zaitchik in The New Republic:

In the 1960s, Arthur C. Clarke was the face of futurism. A deep-sea explorer, inventor, and science-fiction author, Clarke dazzled Anglophone audiences with visions of global computer and satellite networks, space travel, and artificial intelligence. Against his boundless technological optimism, the Cold War could appear but a blip. This sleight of exuberance drove interest in his Wellsian articles and essays, collected in 1962’s Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry Into the Limits of the Possible. The adages that anchor that book—“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”—appeared just as a 14-year old prodigy named Ray Kurzweil was teaching himself to build computers in his family home in Queens, New York. Six decades later, Kurzweil still quotes Profiles of the Future in his lectures and writing. And when it comes to understanding Kurzweil’s signature idea—the merging of human and artificial intelligence that he calls the Singularity—it’s useful to look at the screenplay Clarke wrote with Stanley Kubrick a few years later.

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Hannah Thomasy in The Scientist:

When Julie Moreno arrived at Texas A&M University as a first-generation student in 2000, she wanted to work in veterinary medicine. But the opportunity to work in a research laboratory during her time as an undergraduate ignited her passion for science and changed the course of her life. “Before that, I was never exposed to research,” said Moreno. “I didn’t even know it was an option.”

Once she had discovered this career path, she never looked back. After completing her undergraduate degree, she applied to a PhD program at Colorado State University (CSU), where her interest in neuroscience began to blossom.  “I love the brain,” she enthused. “It’s super exciting because there’s so many unknowns—like a big puzzle that we haven’t figured out yet.” In her graduate work, Moreno investigated the neurotoxic effects of manganese exposure on brain development, exploring the roles of glial cells and neuroinflammatory pathways in mediating these effects and identifying estrogen as a potential protective factor.^1,2 She impressed fellow lab members, including Katriana Popichak, an undergraduate researcher at the time, with her dedication to her research as well as her unflagging commitment to helping others.

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A. S. Hamrah at n+1:

Right away, Lee Isaac Chung’s Twisters won me over with a twist I did not expect: it killed off almost its entire cast of young STEM jerks in the first big scene. I’m so sick of these chipper teams of Spielbergian science kids in everything. Read a real book for a change. “Five years later,” they’ve been replaced by an alternative group of gnarly storm-chasing tornado wranglers—older STEM kids in disguise, but a slight improvement.

The film borrows heavily from the classic Only Angels Have Wings playbook, in which an experience-hardened daredevil (Glen Powell/Cary Grant) tutors a skittish female newcomer (Daisy Edgar-Jones/Jean Arthur) in the ways of danger and adventure (filming tornadoes in Oklahoma/delivering airmail in the Andes). Powell as Hawksian man works fine, but Edgar-Jones, a Brit playing a New Yorkified Southerner who sounds like Anne Hathaway, never quite rises to the challenge of having a personality.

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Wendy Brown interviews Paul Reitter and Paul North, translators and coeditors of a new edition of Karl Marx’s Capital, in Jacobin:

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Wendy Brown in The Nation:

Only a few centuries old, capitalism’s unprecedented mode of producing for human needs and generating wealth shapes present and future conditions of earthly existence more pervasively and profoundly than anything else humans have made. It affects the entirety of the planet’s surface and crafts both possibilities and challenges for all life upon it. It arrays 8 billion homo sapiens across a wildly uneven spectrum of opulence, comfort, poverty, and desperation. It contours all social relations and subjectivities, from practices of work and leisure to arrangements of kinship, intimacy, and loneliness. In addition to class, it constructs and mobilizes race and gender in continuously changing yet persistently exploitable ways. It powers technological revolutions and scatters the discarded remains of past ones everywhere on earth and in orbits circling it. It birthed the Anthropocene—the epoch in which human and “natural” histories are now permanently and dynamically entwined—and within it, the Great Acceleration: the short half-century in which fossil fuel use intensified so radically as to inaugurate what scientists term the Sixth Mass Extinction. And it incited the development of finance, artificial intelligence, and other practices animated by digital technologies that bode ever more intense and paradoxical ways to both serve and dominate the species that invented them.

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Jack Gross and Dylan Saba interview Fathi Nimer in Phenomenal World:

On August 28, Israel launched its largest military assault on the West Bank since the Second Intifada more than two decades ago. Targeting Jenin, Tulkarem, and Tubas—three cities in the north of the territory—“Operation Summer Camps” has killed thirty-nine Palestinians. The military also injured 150 people, arrested dozens more, and demolished critical infrastructure. Stretches of roads were torn up, storefronts were bulldozed, and water and electricity lines were destroyed.

Statements from Israeli security officials indicating that the raids might be the beginning of a protracted military operation have given way to their withdrawal from some of the northern cities. Meanwhile, troops remain active, with raids and arrests reported over the weekend in Nablus and Hebron. (The Israeli military also killed an American-Turkish activist at a demonstration in a village south of Nablus last Friday by shooting her in the head.)

The latest dramatic ground operation and aerial bombardments are less an opening of a new front alongside Gaza and the Lebanese border, and more of an escalation of Israel’s military activity in the territory. Israeli forces enter the occupied West Bank at will, often with the stated objective of targeting Palestinian resistance fighters. Since October 7, over 650 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, over 150 of whom were children. Just days before Operation Summer Camps was launched, settler-soldiers attacked Wadi Rahal, a village near Bethlehem, and killed a Palestinian man; two weeks before his murder, settlers waged a pogrom in the village of Jit—burning homes and murdering another man. Before October, 2023 was already the deadliest year on record for Palestinians in the West Bank.

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Abhrajyoti Chakraborty in The Guardian:

In October 2014, five months after Narendra Modi was first elected as the prime minister of India, he claimed that the legend of the Hindu god Ganesha – whose elephant head was affixed to a human body – proved that cosmetic surgery existed in ancient India. Not long after, a retired pilot instructor, Anand Bodas, presented a joint research paper at the Indian Science Congress in Mumbai asserting that the repeated mentions of chariots and flying machines in ancient Sanskrit epics proved that aircrafts and drones were being developed in the Indian subcontinent 7,000 years ago.

Over the past decade of Modi’s rule, the country’s history has been embellished with visions of a fantastic, and technologically advanced, Hindu past. For the ruling Bharatiya Janata party (BJP), history and mythology are one and the same: the land south of the Himalayas was once a prelapsarian Hindu arcadia, which led the world in economic growth and scientific research. Our temples were apparently awash with gold; and 20th-century breakthroughs of western science such as stem-cell research and nuclear fission were all pioneered in India millennia ago. This fabled paradise was inevitably sullied by the arrival of “outsiders”: Hindu supremacists have consistently maintained that bloodthirsty Muslim invaders ran riot across the country from the 11th century onwards, massacring millions, destroying temples and universities.

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Stacey Colino in Time Magazine:

There’s a hidden gender gap when it comes to digestive problems, with women taking the lead in this unpleasant contest. While men are hardly immune to gastrointestinal woes, certain digestive problems are considerably more common in women. “Women aren’t broken—they’re just different,” says Dr. Jeanetta Frye, a gastroenterologist at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. For one thing, she says, “women have more visceral hypersensitivity so they may feel gastrointestinal symptoms more intensely.”

Symptom sensitivity aside, there’s clear evidence that certain digestive disorders are more likely to affect women than men. Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS)—a disorder that involves repeated bouts of abdominal pain and changes in bowel movements (diarrhea, constipation, or alternating bouts of the two)—is two to six times more common among women than men. Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), including Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis, affects twice as many women as men, according to the American College of Gastroenterology.

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Immanuel Kant

The philosophy of white blood cells:
this is self,
this is non-self.
The starry sky of non-self,
perfectly mirrored
deep inside.
Immanuel Kant,
perfectly mirrored
deep inside.

And he knows nothing about it,
he is only afraid of drafts.
And he knows nothing about it,
though this is the critique
of pure reason.

Deep inside.

by Miroslav Holub
from The Vintage Book of Contemporary World Poetry

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Paul Lindholdt at JSTOR Daily:

Around Christmas Eve 1955, Alfred Matthew Hubbard turned Aldous Huxley on to LSD. Their meeting took place at Huxley’s home in the Hollywood Hills. Seemingly from different universes, these two figures found a curious point of convergence via lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), the hallucinogen first synthesized in a lab in Switzerland in 1938. Humphry Osmond, a British psychiatrist who’d moved to Canada in 1951, arranged the meeting, at Huxley’s request. Osmond was by then well known as a specialist in the altered states produced by LSD and other hallucinogens. A friend of Huxley’s, Osmond had given the writer mescaline—a naturally occurring hallucinogen—in 1953; that trip inspired Huxley’s Doors of Perception from 1954, a book that details the visions the drug produced. “The seminal psychedelic handbook,” as the late Todd Brendan Fahey called it in a profile of Hubbard from High Times Magazine, records in detail Huxley’s initial chemical enlightenment.

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Alison George in New Scientist:

Genetic analysis of a Neanderthal fossil found in France reveals that it was from a previously unknown lineage, a remnant of an ancient population that had remained in extreme isolation for more than 50,000 years. This finding sheds new light on the final phase of the species’ existence.

The fossil, dubbed Thorin after a character in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, was discovered in 2015 at the Grotte Mandrin in the Rhône Valley in southern France when Ludovic Slimak of the Centre for Anthropobiology and Genomics of Toulouse uncovered some teeth in the cave’s soil. The skeleton was painstakingly excavated over the next nine years to reveal 31 teeth, the jawbone, part of the skull and thousands of other bone fragments.

This was an incredible discovery in itself, as remains of Neanderthals – who lived in Eurasia from around 400,000 years ago until they went extinct around 40,000 years ago – are exceedingly rare.

Even more surprising was that Thorin’s genome could be obtained from a fragment of one of his teeth, as DNA isn’t typically preserved in warm climates. This revealed that the fossil was from a male, but opened up a mystery that took years to solve.

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