Kent Jones at The Current:

The structure of Otrar is certainly all of a piece with German’s own work. But as a total film experience, it feels distinctly different from Khrustalyov, Ivan Lapshin, or German’s posthumously completed Hard to Be a God (2013, a years-in-the-making adaptation cowritten by German and Karmalita, traces of which can be felt in Otrar). “They were two of the most renowned filmmakers of Soviet cinema,” said Amirkulov in conversation with production designer Umirzak Shmanov. “We were, of course, very lucky to have them as the screenwriters. The script was extensive, extremely cumbersome, and completely uncompromising in the sense that they never settled for bypassing historical facts or circumstances, and they never came up with any easy solutions. On the one hand, it was very difficult to film. On the other hand, it was incredibly energizing because the script itself read like good literature. That’s why I’m grateful to fate for bringing me together with people like Alexei and Svetlana. I learned a great deal from their script because I had to put in a lot of effort, thought, and research to bring it to life. I even studied music, painting, read a lot of literature about the period, and watched films to match the material they had written.”

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Noah Smith at Noahpinion:

The U.S. should follow Canada’s lead on EV tariffs, slashing them to a very low level while initially limiting the number of annual imports. While Canada’s deal involved only vague promises of Chinese investment in the Canadian auto industry, the U.S. should require far more firm commitments, along with strong incentives for local sourcing of components like batteries and motors. And the dangers of espionage and sabotage can probably be minimized through additional measures.

There are a number of reasons that this would be in America’s own self-interest.

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Jay Caspian Kang at the New Yorker:

Two years ago, I wrote about Wayne Hsiung, the founder of the animal-liberation group Direct Action Everywhere, or DxE. Hsiung is among the most interesting activists I’ve encountered, in part because he faces a nearly impossible task: the public does not like animal-rights activists, and, even if people don’t want beagles to be tortured in testing facilities, it’s relatively easy for them to turn a blind eye to such things. That challenge of advancing a cause that not many people will get behind forced Hsiung and DxE to come up with increasingly novel ways to further their aims. Most famously, they engaged in so-called open rescues, breaking into breeding facilities and factory farms, basically kidnapping distressed animals, and then giving them new homes. Hsiung’s mission, outside of saving animals, was to get arrested and charged with various felonies so that he could then represent himself in court and argue that helping an animal in distress is legally justified.

But, last year, Hsiung made a surprising announcement: he was enrolling in a seminary. In a blog post about the decision, he wrote, “I have spent most of the last 20 years of my life understanding the power of disruption. But one cannot disrupt, effectively or sustainably, when one stands alone.

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Ewen Callaway in Nature:

Which animals came first? For more than a century, most evidence suggested that sponges, immobile filter-feeders that lack muscles, neurons and other specialized tissues, were the first animal lineages to emerge. Then, in 2008, a genomic study pointed to a head-scratching rival¹: dazzling, translucent predators called comb jellies, or ctenophores, with nerves, muscles and other sophisticated features.

That single study ignited a debate that has raged for nearly 20 years, sparking fierce arguments about how complexity evolved in animals. But after dozens of studies — some of which analysed and reanalysed the same data and reached different conclusions — the debate has become entrenched, some researchers say. “Where it might have been healthy for people to engage with curiosity and an interest in finding the truth together, it became a battle,” says Nicole King, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who co-authored a paper last November that landed cautiously on ‘team sponge’².

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Everything That Happens Can Be Called Aging

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Ali Akbar Natiq in Granta:

‘Haji sahib, these kids are beyond me. I can’t teach them any more. Please make some other arrangement,’ he said, throwing his hands in the air.

‘Why do I need another arrangement when I have you?’ Haji Altaf sounded apologetic. ‘I have tried every good tutor in the city but nobody has lasted even a month. I thought you were from a good family and needed a job. You are the only one who can teach these rascals. You can go and look for another job but while you are looking, please keep teaching them.’

‘Haji sahib, that’s all very well. But your grandsons don’t respect me, they don’t listen to a single thing I tell them. I am wasting their time as well as my own. I do hard manual labour all day – I just don’t have the energy to do this too.’ Asghar started to walk out of the door but stopped and turned. ‘Haji sahib, if you really have any sympathy for me, see if you can get me a proper job.’

‘Okay,’ Haji said. ‘But I don’t want you to spend the rest of your life building minarets for mosques.’

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Joshua Bodwell at the Los Angeles Review of Books:

By the mid-1960s, Charles Bukowski had become a sort of king of the underground, the most published poet in the “littles,” as the magazines, alternative newspapers, and small presses that proliferated in the 1960s were known. John Martin read Bukowski’s poems in obscure, poorly printed zines and bought his thin, saddle-stapled chapbooks released in press runs of perhaps a couple hundred copies. Martin believed Bukowski was a genius: “I thought he was the contemporary Walt Whitman, writing right from the street.”

The nascent publisher and the writer with a cult following began to correspond, and shortly after the new year of 1966, Martin visited Bukowski at the poet’s rented 1920s bungalow in East Hollywood. They made an odd pair. Martin was tall, trim, and bespectacled; what hair he had was red-tinged. Bukowski was greasy-haired with a beer paunch, his face pockmarked. Yet their ambitions complimented one another. Martin left with a sheaf of unpublished poems he believed were “immortal.”

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Junsol Kim, Shiyang Lai, Nino Scherrer, Blaise Agüera y Arcas, and James Evans in a new paper:

Through quantitative analysis and mechanistic interpretability methods applied to reasoning traces, we find that reasoning models like DeepSeek-R1 and QwQ-32B exhibit much greater perspective diversity than instruction-tuned models, activating broader conflict between heterogeneous personality- and expertise-related features during reasoning. This multi-agent structure manifests in conversational behaviors, including question-answering, perspective shifts, and the reconciliation of conflicting views, and in socio-emotional roles that characterize sharp back-and-forth conversations, together accounting for the accuracy advantage in reasoning tasks. Controlled reinforcement learning experiments reveal that base models increase conversational behaviors when rewarded solely for reasoning accuracy, and fine-tuning models with conversational scaffolding accelerates reasoning improvement over base models. These findings indicate that the social organization of thought enables effective exploration of solution spaces. We suggest that reasoning models establish a computational parallel to collective intelligence in human groups, where diversity enables superior problem-solving when systematically structured, which suggests new opportunities for agent organization to harness the wisdom of crowds.

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Nathan Gardels at Noema:

When the United States summarily defected from the world order it had built since the end of World War II, effectively joining the revisionist powers of China and Russia, it was clear we were headed back to the kind of Great Power spheres of influence that characterized the 19th century. What was less clear was how all those left out of this equation would fare going forward.

In the most powerful speech delivered at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, this week, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney laid out a forward-looking vision for those who must operate in the breach.

To begin with, he acknowledged that, for all its faults and hypocrisies, the liberal rules-based order did benefit the security and prosperity of smaller powers enough to foster their allegiance. But that is all over. We should not fool ourselves that we are in a moment of “transition” that may someday revert to an approximation of the old normality, he chided. Rather, we are facing a total “rupture” with the past that compels the less powerful to construct an alternative collective approach.

“Middle powers must act together because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu,” he bluntly told the government and business elites assembled in the Alps.

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Elay Shech at Aeon Magazine:

Everything around you – from tables and trees to distant stars and the great diversity of animal and plant life – is built from a small set of elementary particles. According to established scientific theories, these particles fall into two basic and deeply distinct categories: bosons and fermions.

Bosons are sociable. They happily pile into the same quantum state, that is, the same combination of quantum properties such as energy level, like photons do when they form a laser. Fermions, by contrast, are the introverts of the particle world. They flat out refuse to share a quantum state with one another. This reclusive behaviour is what forces electrons to arrange themselves in layered atomic shells, ultimately giving rise to the structure of the periodic table and the rich chemistry it enables.

At least, that’s what we assumed. In recent years, evidence has been accumulating for a third class of particles called ‘anyons’. Their name, coined by the Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek, gestures playfully at their refusal to fit into the standard binary of bosons and fermions – for anyons, anything goes.

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Maria Popova at The Marginalian:

Few things in life cause us more suffering than the confusions of love, all the wrong destinations at which we arrive by following a broken compass, having mistaken myriad things for love: admiration, desire, intellectual affinity, common ground.

This is why knowing whether you actually love somebody can be so difficult, why it requires the rigor of a theorem, the definitional precision of a dictionary, and the courage to weather the depredations of time.

In On the Calculation of Volume (public library) — her startlingly original reckoning with the bewilderments of time and love, partway between Einstein’s Dreams and Ulysses — Danish author Solvej Balle offers the best definition of love I’ve encountered since Iris Murdoch’s half a century ago:

The sudden feeling of sharing something inexplicable, a sense of wonder at the existence of the other — the one person who makes everything simple — a feeling of being calmed down and thrown into turmoil at one and the same time.

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Tharin Pillay in Time Magazine:

“I’m not used to getting nasty emails from a holy man,” says Professor Michael Levin, a developmental biologist at Tufts University.

Levin was presenting his research to a group of engineers interested in spiritual matters in India, arguing that properties like “mind” and “intelligence” can be observed even in cellular systems, and that they exist on a spectrum. His audience loved it. But when he pushed further—arguing that the same properties emerge everywhere, including in computers—the reception shifted. “Dumb machines” and “dead matter” could not have these properties, members of his audience insisted. “A lot of people who are otherwise spiritual and compassionate find that idea very disturbing,” he says. Hence, the angry emails.

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Quinn Slobodian, Priya Lal, Gary Gerstle and Tehila Sasson in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society:

[Quinn Slobodian] Until very recently, to talk about the category of neoliberalism in the discipline of history was to describe an absence. While the term experienced rapid adoption in the adjacent fields of geography, anthropology and sociology in the early millennium, it remained a piece of jargon too far for most historians, who are temperamentally leery of what they perceive as trendy terminology and prefer their research to be implicitly rather than explicitly informed by theoretical work. Yet the last decade has seen the category of neoliberalism tiptoeing into the work of historians too. The term ‘neoliberal’ appeared in the title of an article in American Historical Review and Past & Present for the first time in 2019 and 2021, respectively. Angus Burgin’s intellectual history of neoliberalism, The Great Persuasion, won the Merle Curti Award for best book in intellectual history; Duke historian Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains was a finalist for the National Book Award; my own book – with neoliberalism in its title – received a prize from the American Historical Association; and the book of another contributor to this forum, The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order, was shortlisted for the Financial Times Business Book of the Year.

How can we explain the creeping mainstreaming of neoliberalism for historians? One reason is external to the university. Broader public debates in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis, the Eurozone crisis and the responding political formations of Occupy and the ‘movements of the squares’ injected an activist strain inside the academy among graduate students who, in some cases, are now junior professors or postdoctoral scholars with their first books published. More senior scholars have also responded to the zeitgeist. To offer one prominent example, the economic historian Adam Tooze, who largely eschewed the category of neoliberalism in his earlier work, made it central in his more recent publications. Despite its periodic denunciations as a category by some senior historians and the preference of others to handle it only with the tongs of scare quotes, neoliberalism has shown its traction as a concept deployed by people to make sense of a present where people’s life chances seem constrained by a capitalist framework beyond the power of any individual or single state.

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Pedro Abramovay in The Ideas Letter:

In 2025, the Rio de Janeiro Carnival parade was, for the first time, interrupted by an announcement: I Am Still Here, a film that portrays the brutality of Brazil’s military dictatorship, had won the Oscar for Best International Feature Film. It was the first time Brazil had won. The atmosphere in the Sambódromo, a special stadium built by architect Oscar Niemeyer for the annual Carnival parade, was as euphoric as a World Cup victory.

The film is not an easy one. Directed by Walter Salles Jr, it depicts the tragic story of the forced disappearance of former congressman Rubens Paiva and the search—led by his wife, Eunice—for the truth about what happened to her husband, a former Congressman who was imprisoned, tortured, and killed by the military forces at the behest of Brazil’s dictatorship. In a country as polarized as Brazil, it was far from obvious that the Oscar victory of such a political film would be celebrated almost unanimously.

Brazil remains deeply divided in its interpretation of the dictatorship. Half the country voted to reelect former president Jair Bolsonaro in 2022, who not only continues to defend the military regime as the best period in Brazil’s history, but attempted to actually replicate the coup d’état that inaugurated the dictatorship in 1964 when his opponent, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, won. He is currently imprisoned.

Bolsonaro’s hatred for I Am Still Here runs deep. He has always despised Rubens Paiva: In 2014, when the country erected a statue honoring Paiva, Bolsonaro spat on it. So the fact that the film provoked an explosion of joy in the Sambódromo, interrupting the Carnival parade, is no small matter.

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Kayhan Valadbaygi in Phenomenal World:

The recent unrest in Iran marks the fourth major uprising since 2017.1 Sparked by merchants in Tehran who closed their stores in protest at a sharp drop in the currency, the ferment soon spread across the nation, drawing in a wide cross-section of people—from students to business owners to the urban poor—who clashed with the increasingly repressive state authorities. Over the next three weeks, the turmoil only seemed to escalate: an internet blackout, a mounting death toll, apparent penetration of the protests by Mossad, threats of bombing and regime change from Washington.

And then, in a matter of days, the momentum ebbed away. The government appeared to regain control, using what one analyst described as a “systematic strategy to encircle and fatigue the protest movement.” For now, it seems the clerical establishment will remain in place, since the domestic opposition is not strong enough to dislodge it and the US is unwilling to risk a major intervention.

Yet the crackdown has done nothing to address the origins of the upheaval, which lie in the country’s political economy and social structure. These have been reshaped, in recent decades, by two primary forces: the neoliberalization of the post-revolutionary state since the early 1990s, and the dramatic expansion of international sanctions since 2012. This has reconfigured Iran’s patterns of accumulation, allowing a narrow set of actors—primarily the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and the religious-revolutionary foundations—to consolidate power.

For everyone else, conditions have deteriorated. Inequality and poverty are on the rise. Casualization and wage repression are ubiquitous. Welfare has been eroded, the middle class has been hollowed out, and a growing stratum of educated youth are unemployed or underemployed. The result is a simmering crisis of legitimacy, which now routinely erupts into the open. In what follows, I will show how deep political-economic transformations created the context for the events of this month, and interrogate their meaning for the future of the Iranian regime. Roiled from within and menaced from without, what are its chances of survival?

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Maria Diaz will be the first to tell you that she’s a hype person. If she’s out on the town with her friends, she will happily dance with a stranger. If no one else is moving, she’ll try to get the club going. “We don’t care if people are not,” said 29-year-old Los Angeleno. “That’s what we came out there to do.”

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