Anika Burgess at The New Yorker:

Oldoini was born in Florence, in 1837, just two years before the announcement of a new photographic medium: the daguerreotype. In 1854, at sixteen, she married the twenty-eight-year-old Count de Castiglione; the following spring, they had a son, Georgio, and she had her first documented extramarital affair. Near the end of 1855, the family moved to Paris. The move involved some diplomatic intrigue: present-day Italy was then a patchwork of independent states, and Oldoini’s cousin, the politician Camillo Benso, Count di Cavour, tasked her with promoting Italian unification at Napoleon III’s court. It seems to have been clear to di Cavour that, no matter what happened, Oldoini could not be ignored.

“Never have I seen such a beauty, and never again will I see one like her,” Princess Pauline Metternich recalled in a memoir. Oldoini arrived late at events so as to make a grand entrance. When she went to the theatre, audiences would allegedly stand and applaud at the sight of Oldoini in her box. “She is the queen of beauty, poise, and grace, and when she arrives, she looks like Venus strolling by,” gushed the fashion journal Le Bon Ton. At one summer soirée, in 1856, the countess and the French Emperor spent a long time alone on an island in a lake. By winter, their affair was common knowledge.

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Tangy Sips of Poetry Soup

Slow- fire gleams across the horizon
as I gather words from twig-like strips
adding creamy broth to stir the brew
under a moonlight of summer’s heat …
The mellow breeze warms my thoughts
where hands pour lemon mint, in a campfire
kindling essence of lines for Poetry Soup:
then to grasp fireflies brightly adorned
until cheeks flush with tales spun nightlong.

The purée explodes to drink the light
of my muse, her delicacy soaked in potion
with a dash of tangy sage to flame verse
or rhyme Oh the meal is simple
but rich, delicious, releasing a flavor
uncommon even to me… a concoction
different each time, when a tribe’s mix
of language, time zone, and blogs heal,
excite, and char each sip of soup
blended from the heart’s campfire.

by Netti Unclaud
from Poetry Soup,2/19/26

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Morgan Meis at Slant Books:

I was watching Vampyros Lesbos the other day, which is, shall we say, very much less than a perfect movie. It is not even, by any reasonable standard for what makes a movie good, a good movie. It is a bad movie, and upon further reflection I’m not even sure if we should call it a movie at all, since it is constructed so sloppily. You could say that instead of a movie it is really just some scenes. There are some scenes, they don’t fit together that well, and then it is over.

The film was directed by Jess Franco, a person well-known to schlock horror and B-movie aficionados. From the early 1960s into the early 2000s, Jess made about three movies a year, which is no mean feat, except that when you watch many of these films it becomes clear that it may indeed have been a mean feat. To say that Jess churned them out would be something of an understatement.

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Cesar A. Hidalgo at his own website:

Much of the public conversation about AI focuses on chat interfaces like ChatGPT. But a quieter revolution is happening in command line AI systems such as Claude Code or Codex. Unlike chatbots, these systems can act autonomously. Given a goal, they can download data, write code, install software, run analyses, and generate figures, working like a research assistant in a can.

When we pair these “research assistants in a can” with AI reviewer systems, we can explore what happens when feedback cycles that traditionally take months collapse into hours. This is leading to a new type of research workflow, one producing what I call AI generated papers, or AIGPs.

To explore this idea, I did exactly this. placed a CLI AI tasked with writing a paper in a loop with an AI reviewer.

My conclusion is that an AI tsunami is approaching the sciences, and while some researchers are running towards the wave with their surfboards, many are still sleeping on the beach. This essay is an attempt to explore this emerging technology using a hands on example, using this as an opportunity to reflect on what it means to be a scholar while sounding the tsunami alarm system.

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Quico Toro at Persuasion:

American military planners in the Pentagon have been wargaming scenarios for attacking Iran more or less non-stop since 1979. One major reason president after president stopped short of launching an attack was the frightening realization that the Islamic Republic could always choose to shut down the Strait of Hormuz—that narrow waterway through which roughly a quarter of the world’s oil and a fifth of its liquefied natural gas (LNG) flows every day. Iran could also hit the oil platforms and gas liquefaction facilities of the neighboring Gulf states. It could, in other words, turn off a frightening proportion of the global energy spigot, setting off an energy shock with implications nobody could quite predict.

American strategists cared a lot about the way Iran destabilizes the Middle East. But they cared about energy security, too. Which is one reason why every president from Jimmy Carter on took one look at the war option presented by the Pentagon and said, “yeah, no.”

So what changed? It’s tempting to think the answer is “the man at the top,” and, sure, that’s clearly an important part of the story. But it’s not just about personalities. The strategic weight of Hormuz in the American calculus changed too, because a bunch of geology nerds working for a handful of U.S. energy firms figured out a way to inject water into shale formations at high enough pressure to dislodge the hydrocarbons embedded in the rock.

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Noubar Afeyan in Time Magazine:

Scientists once thought illness was caused by “miasmas,” foul vapors that drifted through the air. For centuries, they were certain that the sun rotated around the Earth. Until the 1950s, they believed lobotomies were the best way to treat mental illness. Why did we stop believing these things? In each case, skeptics used the scientific method to produce data that disproved the incumbent theory. They hypothesized, experimented, observed, analyzed, iterated, and then published the results, precipitating a shift in our collective understanding of the world.

Every great breakthrough in scientific history began with a “what if” that reached past established doctrine into the realm of possibility. Doubt and debate are the prisms that test our current ideas and help to generate new ones. Perhaps, then, it’s good that it’s now more popular than ever to be skeptical of science.

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Sean Mowbray in Discover:

Over the last few years, numerous studies, including those in Nature Communications and Environmental International, have found nanoplastics and microplastics throughout the human body, including the blood, bones, and brain. Unsurprisingly, these findings sparked serious concern about the possible impact on human health. But as these papers began making headlines, some researchers questioned the findings and the approach. One scientist told The Guardian these concerns amount to a “bombshell.” Stephanie Wright, an associate professor at Imperial College London, discussed in The Guardian how we don’t have a strong grasp of the accuracy of these microplastic studies. It’s possible that they are overestimating the amount of plastic in our bodies.

There are many reasons to be doubtful about papers that have found plastics in the human body, according to experts such as Leon Barron, professor of Analytical & Environmental Sciences at Imperial College London. He points to a Nature Medicine study that found microplastics in the human brain. That particular paper suggested that the brain had higher concentrations of microplastics than other parts of the body, such as the kidneys or liver. “Given the size of particles that they were reporting in that paper, it didn’t seem believable that it would get into the brain,” Barron told Discover. Another reason is that picking out tiny plastic fragments that may or may not be present in the human body is tricky. Plastics can give off similar signals to naturally occurring fatty tissues, said Barron. There is also the ever-present issue of sample contamination during testing.

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Daniele Belleri in The Ideas Letter:

Late last May, the prime ministers of Europe’s Nordic countries gathered in a former tuberculosis sanatorium hidden among the pine forests of southwestern Finland. It was an unlikely venue for a high-level diplomatic forum: Most parts of the building had been in disuse for a decade and needed restoration. But the symbolism was hard to miss. As the hybrid war waged by Vladimir Putin against the Old Continent loomed large over the talks, the Finnish government hosts were suggesting that healing and care can be political tools, too.

The venue, the Paimio Sanatorium, was designed in the early 1930s by Alvar and Aino Aalto and is widely regarded as a masterpiece of Modernist architecture. Erected when tuberculosis had no pharmacological treatment and was a leading cause of death, the building has been described as a “medical instrument” in itself. It distilled some of the principles that would define Finnish design in the following decades: functional restraint, social purpose, and quality accessible to all. From its noiseless sinks designed not to disturb patients to customized, easy-to-clean lamps and seats (now sold as fashionable objects), it stood out as a gesamtkunstwerk,a total work of art, that embedded empathy and efficiency down to the smallest details. Rooms were oriented so that patients, who might spend months or even years in the sanatorium, could be exposed to the outside forest and find relief in at least some contact with nature.

Last spring, the security agencies of northern Europe may have found this backdrop unexpected. But for more than a century, Finnish architecture and design has functioned as an instrument of nation-building. It supported the country’s independence process, then its consolidation as a highly functioning trust society, and finally the development of its comprehensive defense strategy. Local design has demonstrated the underlying political, even geopolitical, dimension of the built environment. Today, as Europe faces imperial pressures from both Russia and the US, that legacy is acquiring continental significance.

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Gavin Evans in Aeon:

The Florida peninsula looks like a sore thumb. It juts into the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic, where the water is getting warmer year on year, prompting fiercer hurricanes that can blow down houses like collapsing decks of cards. Climate scientists are convinced all hell will break loose sooner or later when a monster-sized, property-destroying storm makes a direct hit on Miami or Tampa-St Petersburg. Given three near-misses in the recent past, the experts view such a calamity as inevitable. It’s a huge risk for anyone living there – they stand to lose everything – but also for those bearing the financial side of this risk, the insurance companies. Some in the industry are seeing this as a portent for their future – an impending existential threat with profound implications for the economic system.

There are no easy solutions for people still paying off mortgages and those who want to buy property along the Florida coast, because the potential payout on the back of a mammoth storm is so high that the reinsurers (who insure the insurers against catastrophe) are refusing to underwrite their clients and, with no reinsurance, there’s no insurance; and with no insurance, no mortgages; and with no mortgages, no property market. Insurance protects investments against loss and is therefore a pillar of the economic system. If it goes, economies are destabilised.

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Kate Mackenzie an Tim Sahay in Polycrisis:

Eulogies for the rules-based international order have been piling up in 2026. Mark Carney’s speech at Davos in January was lauded for its open acknowledgment of the political “rupture” in the world order that has been long apparent, but which no world leader of the global North had as yet been willing to openly name. The US-led liberal order was as good as finished, Carney surmised, and it was incumbent on “middle powers” such as Canada and the Europeans to recognize that fact. In its place, “a system of intensifying great power rivalry where the most powerful pursue their interests using economic integration as a weapon of coercion” was emerging. He described a near-Hobbesian vision of geopolitical relations in which “the strong can do what they can and the weak must suffer what they must.” The task, he argued, was for middle powers to “act together” so as to increase their leverage. “If we’re not at the table,” he warned, “we’re on the menu.”

Carney’s speech was received at the time as not only a clarion call for what Finnish president Alexander Stubbs has called “values-based realism,” but as a viable alternative to the bullying treatment many US allies have received at the hands of the second Trump administration. The joint Israeli and US airstrikes on Iran last week brought with them the first test of Carney’s stated commitment to “sovereignty and territorial integrity,” as he had put it in his speech at Davos, and Carney was quick to voiced his support for his allies’ bombing campaign in the name of “international peace and security”—all while insisting the assault was due to the “failure of the rules-based international order.” Whether or not Canada will be drawn into the expanding war in the Middle East remains to be seen. For now, Carney is plowing ahead with his plans for building strategic autonomy from Washington’s unpredictable trade policies.

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Stephen Harding in Literary Hub:

By the spring of 1939, the widely acknowledged dean of Anglo-American Modernist poetry, fifty-three-year-old Ezra Pound, had lived in Europe for three decades. After leaving the United States in 1908 at the age of twenty- three, the poet had initially settled in London, then moved on to Paris, and in 1924, to the Italian seaside town of Rapallo, fifteen miles southeast of Genoa. A virulent anti-Semite, Pound became an ardent and vocal supporter of Benito Mussolini and Italian fascism. The poet actually met Il Duce in person on January 30, 1933, and following Franklin Roosevelt’s inauguration as America’s thirty-seventh president just over a month later, Pound quickly evolved into a rabid and outspoken foe of the New Deal and all it represented.

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Alone

Lying, thinking
Last night
How to find my soul a home
Where water is not thirsty
And bread loaf is not stone
I came up with one thing
And I don’t believe I’m wrong
That nobody,
But nobody
Can make it out here alone.

Alone, all alone
Nobody, but nobody
Can make it out here alone.

There are some millionaires
With money they can’t use
Their wives run round like banshees
Their children sing the blues
They’ve got expensive doctors
To cure their hearts of stone.
But nobody
No, nobody
Can make it out here alone.

Alone, all alone
Nobody, but nobody
Can make it out here alone.

Now if you listen closely
I’ll tell you what I know
Storm clouds are gathering
The wind is gonna blow
The race of man is suffering
And I can hear the moan,
’Cause nobody,
But nobody
Can make it out here alone.

Alone, all alone
Nobody, but nobody
Can make it out here alone.

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Judy Berman in Time Magazine:

In the series premiere of Netflix’s Vladimir, Rachel Weisz awakens from troubled sleep to a cascade of texts, sighs deeply, and addresses the camera with pleading eyes. “All I want is a life free of complications,” says her unnamed lead. “If I can’t have power, can I at least be free from other people’s drama? Free from their behavior? Free from their needs and desires?”

It feels appropriate that free appears four times in this monologue, one of the character’s many fourth-wall-shattering asides. She is a blocked novelist who teaches English at a liberal arts college. And there is no setting more emblematic of freedom—and its discontents—than the campus, where tenure is supposed to protect the intellectual liberty of faculty and students living independently for the first time try on new ideas and identities. Among the most common school mottos is veritas vos liberabit: the truth will set you free.

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Morgan Meis at Lapham’s Quarterly:

The book I bought is an English translation of letters written by the painter Franz Marc to his wife, Maria. It is a thin hardcover volume published by Peter Lang as part of the American University Studies series. The edition of the book that I’ve got has about six different fonts on the front cover. Some words are in italics and some words are not. The sizes of the fonts vary considerably as well. It’s as if a small child got into the final layout for the book just before it went to press and started changing things according to a game she was playing in her head.

The letters published in the book were originally written between September 1914 and March 1916. The letters ceased abruptly on March 4, 1916. This was the day Marc was hit in the head by a shell fragment at the Battle of Verdun. He survived the initial impact but didn’t live for much longer. He was thirty-six years old.

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Michelle Boorstein in The Washington Post:

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Eliza Strickland at IEEE Spectrum:

As Matthew Hutson reports in “AI Hunts for the Next Big Thing in Physics,” the field is currently gripped by a quiet crisis. In an email discussing his reporting, Hutson explains that the Standard Model, which describes the known elementary particles and forces, is not a complete picture. “So theorists have proposed new ideas, and experimentalists have built giant facilities to test them, but despite the gobs of data, there have been no big breakthroughs,” Hutson says. “There are key components of reality we’re completely missing.”

That’s why researchers are turning artificial intelligence loose on particle physics. They aren’t simply asking AI to comb through accelerator data to confirm existing theories, Hutson explains. They’re asking AI to point the way toward theories that they’ve never imagined.

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