Timo Schaefer in the Los Angeles Review of Books:
In 1979, most Latin American countries were ruled by right-wing military dictatorships. The Cuban Revolution was 20 years old, and copycat guerrilla groups had been comprehensively defeated across the region thanks in part to heavy United States counterinsurgency efforts. The flame of revolution appeared to be spent. It was in this unpropitious regional context, in the small Central American nation of Nicaragua, that the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (Sandinista National Liberal Front, FSLN), the guerrilla group known colloquially as the Sandinistas, overthrew the brutal, United States–backed dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza. It would turn out to be the last of Latin America’s Cold War revolutions. But for a moment, the Sandinistas’ feat returned hope to a battered socialist Left in the region.
How were the Sandinistas able to achieve victory when so many other guerrilla groups had failed? According to Mateo Jarquín’s intriguing The Sandinista Revolution: A Global Latin American History (2024), a big part of the answer has to do with how the Sandinistas leveraged international diplomacy.
More here.
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Gena Rowlands, who died last Wednesday, at the age of ninety-four, is, of all the actresses I’ve ever seen onscreen, the greatest artist. She’s the one whose performances offer the most surprises, the most shocks, the most moment-to-moment inventiveness, and, above all, the most almost-unbearable force of emotional expression, combining extremes of strength and vulnerability, of overt display and inner life. Her mighty talent is also a peculiar one, the strangeness of which is exemplary of the art of movies: it might never have come so fully to light were it not for her marriage to John Cassavetes and for the movies that they made together—especially the personal six that extend from “
When Devin Singh was a paediatric resident, he attended to a young child who had gone into cardiac arrest in the emergency department after a prolonged wait to see a doctor. “I remember doing CPR on this patient and feeling that kiddo slip away,” he says. Devastated by the child’s death, Singh remembers wondering whether a shorter waiting time could have prevented it.
But then there are the parts of effective altruism that are just … weird.
In 1884, William James began his celebrated essay “The Dilemma of Determinism” by begging his readers’ indulgence: “A common opinion prevails that the juice has ages ago been pressed out of the free-will controversy, and that no new champion can do more than warm up stale arguments which everyone has heard.” James persisted and rendered the subject very juicy, as he always did. But if the topic appeared exhausted to most people then, surely a hundred and forty years later there can’t be anything new to say. Whole new fields of physics, biology, mathematics, and medicine have been invented—surely this ancient philosophical question doesn’t still interest anyone?
I’m an engineer who 
In late 1949, the West Indian intellectual 
The actual exchange between Oppenheimer and Einstein was, as it happened, far less cordial than the film’s version. It ended with an exasperated Einstein telling his assistant, “There goes a Narr [fool],” nodding toward the Institute director.
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So far, we humans have mostly restricted ourselves to the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). The SETI Institute, a private, nonprofit research organization, has built a variety of instruments designed to detect signs of extraterrestrial life. So have other institutes and universities. This activity is reasonably uncontroversial: If somebody is trying to send us a message, it would likely be beneficial to receive it; we can then figure out how, and whether, to answer.
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