Nathan Gardels at Noema:
Among the job doomsayers of the AI revolution, David Autor is a bit of an outlier. As the MIT economist has written in Noema, the capacity of mid-level professions such as nursing, design or production management to access greater expertise and knowledge once available only to doctors or specialists will boost the “applicable” value of their labor, and thus the wages and salaries that can sustain a middle class.
Unlike rote, low-level clerical work, cognitive labor of this sort is more likely to be augmented by decision-support information afforded by AI than displaced by intelligent machines.
By contrast, “inexpert” tasks, such as those performed by retirement home orderlies, child-care providers, security guards, janitors or food service workers, will be poorly remunerated even as they remain socially valuable. Since these jobs cannot be automated or enhanced by further knowledge, those who labor in them are a “bottleneck” to improved productivity that would lead to higher wages. Since there will be a vast pool of people without skills who can take those jobs, the value of their labor will be driven down even further.
This is problematic from the perspective of economic disparity because four out of every five jobs created in the U.S. are in this service sector.
More here.
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In April 2024, microbial geneticist Norberto Gonzalez-Juarbe stood over an enigmatic drawing in a private New York City collection. Gently, he rubbed its centuries-old surface, front and back, with a swab like those used in COVID-19 testing. “It’s not every day,” Gonzalez-Juarbe recalls with a laugh, “that one gets to touch a Leonardo.” Rendered in red chalk on paper, Holy Child shows a young boy’s head inclined slightly to the side, his features sketched with feathery strokes. Light pools softly around his cheeks and brow, dissolving the edges of his pensive face in a haze of sfumato. The late art dealer Fred Kline, who acquired the drawing in the early 2000s, had claimed stylistic features such as left-handed hatching, a trademark of Leonardo da Vinci’s, link Holy Child to the Renaissance master. But its authorship remains in dispute; experts say one of his students could have produced it.
Three years ago, Belgian art dealer 
Earth has entered an “era of water bankruptcy” due to over-consumption and global warming, with 3 in 4 people living in countries that face water shortages, water contamination or drought.
Joan Didion could hardly stand It. More than once, 
In 1897, Russian physician and scientist Marie de Manacéïne made a startling but necessary observation: “If we pay no attention to sleep, we thereby admit that a third part of our lives is unworthy of investigation.” The quality and content of our dreams and our sleep, she believed, could reveal an immense amount of information about our worries, our memories, the things we learn, and the condition of our bodies. Dreams should never be washed away with the morning splash of water to the face.
The terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ come from the seating arrangements in the National Assembly during the French Revolution, where the combatants used the medieval estate groupings to define their battle lines. According to their writings, land-owning aristocrats (the Second Estate) were the party of the Right, while the interests of nearly everyone else (the Third Estate) belonged to the Left. This Third Estate included peasants working for the landowners but also every other kind of business owner and worker. Decades later, Karl Marx offered a different analysis of capitalism: he put owners of both land and businesses together on one side (the bourgeoisie), while grouping workers from fields and factories on the other side (the proletariat) in a single, world-wide class struggle. The trouble with both these ways of parsing Left and Right is that voting patterns never seem to line up with class. Both historic analyses leave us with questions about the contemporary world – and not just the paradox of why so many Left-leaning places are so rich. Why, for example, do working-class conservatives appear to vote against their material interests, year in and year out, across generations?
When Lola was eight years old, she went through a massive growth spurt and started developing acne. Her mother, Elise, thought Lola was just growing fast because of genes inherited from her father. But when she noticed that Lola had grown pubic hair too, she was floored. A visit to an endocrinologist in 2023 confirmed that Lola’s brain was already producing hormones that had kick-started puberty. Lola had also been struggling emotionally. “She would have panic attacks every day at school,” says Elise, who lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and asked that her surname and Lola’s real name be omitted.
Imagine coasting through flu season with barely a sniffle. Or brushing off COVID, no matter how many times it mutated.
Though he still teaches history, Tooze is also widely acknowledged as an expert on the infrastructure of global finance and the economics of the green-energy transition. He is the rare commentator who can speak credibly about the political economy of Europe, the US and 
This also explains [Martin Luther] King’s fierce opposition to riots, even when he understood the rage behind them. “A riot is the language of the unheard,” he said in 1967. But he immediately added that riots were “socially destructive and self-defeating.” As historian David Garrow documents, King believed that violence collapsed the moral clarity the [civil rights] movement depended on, allowing repression to masquerade as order. Riots were strategic failures. They destroyed the information the movement was trying to convey and pushed society back toward the bad equilibrium.
The collected poems displays the evolution of Heaney’s poetic impulses. The apprentice work from the 1960s is already accomplished, if less clarified in its thought and more given over to the tug of spontaneous music. Influences are, inevitably, worn on the sleeve, as in the