Sam Kriss at The Point:

On the 30th of March, 1981, John Hinckley brought us into the world we all live in today. He did it by firing a .22 “Devastator” round into the chest of the president of the United States.

At the time, people didn’t fully understand what had happened. Two hours after the shooting, there was a press conference in the White House briefing room. It was led by a junior official, since Press Secretary James Brady had a bullet lodged in his skull at the time. The questions were on conventional topics, like Ronald Reagan’s health, and the chain of command. The reporters wanted to know if the president was conscious. Had he been sedated? Who was with him in the hospital? While the bullet was being extracted from his chest, who was currently running the United States of America? Vice President George Bush was somewhere in Texas, apparently aware of the situation, but not in Washington yet. The deputy press secretary said he couldn’t answer that one. Moments later, he was yanked offstage, and Secretary of State Alexander Haig took over the podium. “As of now,” he told the media, “I am in control here in the White House.”

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Kapil Komireddi at The New Yorker:

By September 10th, Nepal had descended into a state of lawlessness, a country without a government or authority. The only national institution that survived—and that possessed the capability to restore order—was the Army, which, sheltering the civilian leadership, opened talks with representatives of the protest movement. Events then moved at dizzying speed. Within forty-eight hours, Nepal’s President had been forced to appoint an interim Prime Minister, dissolve the country’s elected Parliament, and announce new elections. As search teams set about recovering bodies from the charred government buildings, the death toll rose to more than seventy, and the number of injured exceeded two thousand.

Nepal is the third South Asian country in the past four years to stage a violent overthrow of its government. In 2022, anger over soaring prices in Sri Lanka erupted into mass protests that swept the Rajapaksa dynasty from power. Last August, the long reign of Sheikh Hasina, Bangladesh’s autocratic Prime Minister, was brought to a sudden end after bloody street rallies culminated in the sacking of her residence.

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Emily Eakin in the New York Times:

Nearly everyone struggled during the pandemic, but Justin Smith-Ruiu’s struggle took a particularly disturbing form. An American philosopher who teaches at the University of Paris, he was on a fellowship in New York in March 2020 when the city shut down, stranding him in a rental apartment in Brooklyn. He caught Covid the same month, and though he recovered from the virus, he sank into a deep, existential despair.

His job, his career milestones, even the homes, schools, hospitals and other institutions around which human social life revolved: All of it suddenly seemed flimsy and meaningless, like so much make-believe. “I had the sharp sense that the things that we take to be real just aren’t real,” he told me. “It was quite extreme.”

Smith-Ruiu, 53, could have sought counseling or joined the Great Resignation by quitting his job. Instead, he turned to drugs — first cannabis, then psilocybin (“magic mushrooms”) and, finally, muscimol, a psychedelic made from another mushroom, the fly agaric.

Yet his interest in mind-altering substances was as much professional as personal: His crisis of belief in the world around him was also, he concluded, a problem for his field.

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Alvin Powell in The Harvard Gazette:

Human history is rife with contentions about the purity (and superiority) of the bloodlines of one group over another and claims over ancestral homelands.

More than a decade of work on ancient human DNA has upended it all.

Instead, Harvard geneticist David Reich said on Monday, increasingly sophisticated analysis of genetic material made possible by technological advances shows that virtually everyone came from somewhere else, and everyone’s genetic background shows a mix from different waves of migration that washed over the globe.

“Ancient DNA is able to peer into the past and to understand how people are related to each other and to people living today,” Reich said during a talk at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. “And what it shows is worlds we hadn’t imagined before. It’s very surprising.”

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Samuel Hayim Brody in the Boston Review:

Mizrahi, a Hebrew word meaning “Eastern,” is used in the State of Israel to refer to Jews from Muslim-majority countries. Confusingly, it has widely come to replace the older term Sephardi, even though the latter traditionally means “Spanish” and has been used since medieval times to describe the Jews of the Iberian Peninsula, many of whom fled to the lands of the Ottoman Empire after their expulsion in 1492. It has never made much sense to describe the Jews of Iraq, for example—millennia-old communities with no connection to Spain or Portugal—as Sephardi. Nor does it make sense to describe Morocco as “east” of Germany. Instead, Mizrahi is an artifact of Israeli history, yoking together Jews with divergent histories in Tunisia, Yemen, and Iraq as they underwent similar experiences of immigration. But precisely because those experiences were so humiliating, the term has its opponents. In The Arab Jews: A Postcolonial Reading of Nationalism, Religion, and Ethnicity (2006), Yehouda Shenhav translates Mizrahi as “Oriental,” succinctly capturing the affects and attitudes that he and other opponents hear in it.

As an alternative, “Arab Jews” has a subversive quality.

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Connick et al in ABC News Australia:

Cancer is one of the most common causes of death in people, and case numbers are rising. At current rates, about one in two Australians can expect a cancer diagnosis by the age of 85. Vets, livestock farmers, pet owners and anyone who spends time around animals will also know that cancer can strike a whole range of creatures. But did you know it’s not just a disease in the animal kingdom?

Plants can get cancer too.

While cancer doesn’t affect plants like it does us, it can cause costly problems for horticultural and agricultural growers. All cancers begin when one cell or a few cells in an organism start growing uncontrollably. In humans and other animals, new healthy cells grow in an orderly and regulated way to replace damaged or dead cells. This keeps our organs and tissues functioning the way they should. But sometimes cells with mistakes in their genetic blueprint (or genome) don’t stop multiplying, and if they clump together, they form a tumour. Bits of that tumour can break away and spread via the bloodstream or lymphatic system to other parts of the body and form new tumours. This process is known as metastasis.

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Heman Chong at Cabinet Magazine:

The first door was in Tokyo, in the Roppongi district. He said he discovered it in a state of boredom, or more exactly, in that mental state that walking in Tokyo is particularly inclined to produce—a state of visual overstimulation that is like boredom, but also strangely close to a kind of hypersensitivity, a readiness to see a hidden order suddenly emerge in the dense life of the city. The door that captured his attention had been placed across a blind alleyway. It had no special features, but was remarkable for being unmarked, without a name, bell, or knocker. Oddly, the cracked cinderblocks that framed the door on either side seemed older than the buildings that they abutted. Behind the door were the branches of some trees, giving the entire scene the hint of a hortus conclusus, a walled garden in a neighborhood that was not known for being green. An electrical conduit snaked along the pavement and over the wall.

Heman Chong’s photograph of the door would become the first in his ongoing series documenting the back entrances of embassies and consulates—over three hundred of them since that first encounter in 2018.

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Afiya Zia in LSE:

The genealogy of blasphemy laws in Pakistan is not merely a story of legal prohibitions but of a shifting moral economy traversing colonial governance, post-colonial authoritarianism and contemporary populist religiosity. Introduced under British rule through Section 295 of the Indian Penal Code of 1860, these laws were designed to regulate communal sentiment and maintain order rather than serve as sacred doctrine. In post-colonial Pakistan, however, they have become sacralised.

General Zia-ul-Haq’s agenda of Islamisation, starting in 1979, transformed the colonial laws on blasphemy (known commonly as the ‘1927 Statutes’) into doctrinal absolutes, as ‘Hudud Ordinances’. Sections 295-B & 295-C criminalised defiling the Qur’an and insulting the Prophet, upgrading such acts into capital offences. What began as colonial order management mutated into a tool to empower clerics, suppress dissent and enforce Sunni orthodoxy.

Reliable data is scarce but the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) records that between 1987–2024 at least 2,793 individuals were accused under blasphemy provisions, with 70–80 per cent of cases in Punjab province. In 2024 alone, 344 new cases were registered — the highest annual figure. CSJ also documented 104 extra-judicial killings between 1994–2024, demonstrating the lethal consequences of law and vigilante action. While minorities remain vulnerable, statistical trends now show that intra-Muslim accusations have surpassed those against non-Muslims and constitute the largest share of those accused of blasphemy.

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Lucy Hughes-Hallett at Literary Review:

Mount’s argument in this erudite, immensely entertaining book is that to be warm and witless (if by ‘witless’ one means devoid of irony, flippancy and cool) is not only to be on the side of the nice and good. It is also a form of power. Not that Mount isn’t witty – I have seldom read a work of cultural history that made me laugh out loud as frequently as this one did. But he is earnest in his belief that sentiment (called ‘sentimentality’ by those who disapprove of it) can prompt substantial social change, reverse injustices, ameliorate the lives of ill-treated people and – sentimentality alert! – enable love.

He identifies three ‘sentimental revolutions’, each one followed by an era of chilly reaction. The first began with the troubadours. Mount accepts C S Lewis’s thesis that they invented courtly love, and he relates that development to the humanisation of medieval Christianity, with its motherly Virgin and crowds of kindly interceding saints. Then, after a ‘stony age’ of austere Protestantism and neoclassical Renaissance grandeur, came the age of sensibility. Mount sees the phenomenal success of Samuel Richardson’s novels as the manifestation of a cultural shift that led to the abolition of slavery and powered the social reforms advocated by Charles Dickens (scoffed at by Trollope as ‘Mr Popular Sentiment’). 

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Catherine Nicholson in New York Review of Books:

Nan Z. Da spent the first six and a half years of her life in the People’s Republic of China. She was born in the 1980s, during a period known as Gaige Kaifang, the “Reform and Opening-Up,” a time of political reorganization and economic liberalization undertaken in the long shadow of Mao’s dictatorship and the Cultural Revolution. Her family left China for the United States when she was a child, and she is now a scholar of nineteenth-century American literature and a professor of English at Johns Hopkins University. But of late she has undergone an uncanny reversion: “For more than six years I have taught Shakespeare’s King Lear, a piece of literature far outside my field, in a class that introduces students to the history and praxis of literary criticism.” Da added Lear to her syllabus, she says, “because it fast-tracks students to the hardest parts of literature and literary criticism”—close reading, textual bibliography, theater history, genre theory. It is plot-heavy, overburdened with detail, and careless of minor characters, and so it “places a great strain on interpretive validity, on accurate assessment and recall.” (Pop quiz: Who is Curan? How many people meet at Dover, or hide in trees? What happens to the King of France?) But Da’s reasons for assigning the play were also personal: “In my mind I was drawing a long and elaborate analogy.”

That analogy—“Lear, China, China, Lear”—forms the spine of Da’s new book, The Chinese Tragedy of “King Lear,” serving as axiom, intuition, experimental hypothesis, and knowing provocation. “Teachers of literature and criticism have to deal with bad analogies and allegoresis all the time,” Da observes. Shakespeareans in particular are well acquainted with the impulse to claim that the writer and his plays illuminate all manner of phenomena: modernity, Western civilization, “the human.” The impulse to analogize can generate fresh insights, but it can also efface what is urgently particular in a text, a time period, a cultural tradition, a historical crisis, a personal experience.

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Chetan Bhatt in The Ideas Letter:

Across the West, the far right represents a fully transformative ambition: the desire to profoundly change the social, political, and cultural dimensions of European and North American societies. Any approach to countering it must be informed by this far-reaching ambition. The far right is now an entrenched aspect of Western politics, and its power is relatively independent of electoral cycles. Democracy seems to be in a “doom spiral.”

The rise of the far right reflects, axiomatically, the failures of the political left, especially its political parties but also the institutional left represented by NGOs and the liberal public and corporate sector. Some of these failures are structural: the political terrain is formidably hostile, the right has vast institutional and financial resources, and right-wing politics is empowered by social media platforms and insurmountable forms of disinformation. At the same time, centrist parties have purged their left but are unwilling to challenge the far right, as in Keir Starmer’s Labour Party.

But the failures of the left—from the inability of mass movements to build durable institutions to the fissiparousness of identitarianism and political sectarianism—are not solely the result of external aggression. Indeed, these identitarian and sectarian tendencies are implicated in the rise of the political forces the left now finds itself struggling to oppose.

These tendencies indicate a fraying of historic associations between morality, knowledge, and emancipation that informed much of the postwar Western left. Those associations have been insufficiently examined to the detriment of the left as a whole. But thinking about how the left exercises morality, and how its moral judgments rely on certain understandings of knowledge, may give a perspective on its state and why it seems incapable of meeting the challenge it currently faces.

Morality is an uneasy idea for the Western left.

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Tim Sahay interviews Mathias Larsen in Phenomenal World:

TIM SAHAY: China’s total dominance in green technologies has provoked anxiety in many countries among policymakers, analysts, and captains of industry—overcapacity and dumping are the watchwords of the moment. One prescription in response has been that China should set up green factories abroad, rather than send out ships laden with green goods. So is that happening?

ML: What our research demonstrates is, in summary, a massive increase of Chinese outward investments in the manufacturing of clean technologies. This both supports the host countries’ development and supports a global green transition.

There are five key takeaways. The first is the scale of investments: more than $200 billion, toward $250 billion, with a rapid increase since 2022. It’s nearing $100 billion a year, which is around the same amount that China gave in infrastructure loans when that peaked in 2018. In comparison, the Marshall Plan by the US after the Second World War was around $200 billion in total. The Marshall Plan locked Europe into US technologies and standards, so when we see sums of this size, we can ask whether it will potentially have a similar effect in the future.

To put this in perspective, China’s domestic investments in green manufacturing were $340 billion in 2024. Compared to $70 billion in outwards green FDI, that’s a fifth.

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Alex Curmi in The Guardian:

One of the central ideas in the field of evolutionary psychology is that of “evolutionary mismatch”. Put simply, we evolved in a very different environment from the one in which we now find ourselves. As a result, our brains, bodies and instincts are poorly matched to their surroundings.

How much does this really matter? Isn’t a hallmark of being human our species’ ability to adapt to changing circumstances? Yes and no. Yes, we have a remarkable ability to deal with new problems, collaborate to find solutions, and create technology to help us realise them. At the same time, anthropologists estimate that human genetics and anatomy have remained largely unchanged for about 100,000 years. Back then, we lived in small nomadic hunter-gatherer tribes, only developing agriculture about 10,000 years ago and civilisations 5,000 years ago.

For all but a vanishingly small number of us, the contemporary human habitat isn’t the one we were made for.

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Nina Pasquini in Harvrad Magazine:

He was a radical, the inventor of blank verse, a master of internal monologue, and a victim of murder. This was the English playwright Christopher Marlowe, a contemporary and rival of William Shakespeare—and perhaps the Bard’s key creative influence.

At 14, young Marlowe—the son of a poor Canterbury cobbler—won a scholarship to the prestigious King’s School, becoming the first in his family to receive a formal education. He excelled, went on to the University of Cambridge, and there studied the great works of antiquity, from Virgil’s Aeneid to Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Where his classmates saw musty mandatory reading, Marlowe found something else: worlds of ecstatic violence and erotic excess, of vengeful outcasts and capricious gods, worlds that upended the Christian moral order in which he was raised.

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American Sermon

I am uniquely privileged to be alive
or so they say. I have asked others
who are unsure, especially the man with three
kids who’s being foreclosed next month.
One daughter says she isn’t leaving the farm,
they can pry her out with tractor
and chain. Mother needs heart surgery
but there is no insurance. A lifetime of cooking
with pork fat. My friend Sam has made
five hundred bucks in 40 years
of writing poetry. He has applied for 120
grants but so have 50,000 others. Sam keeps
strict track. The fact is he’s not very good.
Back to the girl on the farm. She’s been
keeping records of all the wildflowers
on the never-tilled land down the road,
a 40-acre clearing where they’ve bloomed
since the glaciers. She picks wild strawberries
with a young female bear who eats them. She’s being
taken from the eastern Upper Peninsula down
to Lansing where Dad has a job in a
bottling plant. She won’t survive the move.

by Jim Harrison

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Maya Salam at the New York Times:

Guillermo del Toro has been shaping his vision for Victor Frankenstein’s monster since he was 11 years old, when Mary Shelley’s classic 1818 Gothic novel became his Bible, as he put it in a conversation in August.

“Why is it made of many parts?” he recalled wondering as a boy. “I started thinking about the logic of that.”

Now, the filmmaker, with three Oscars to his name, has finally manifested his dream. His “Frankenstein” (out Oct. 17 in theaters and Nov. 7 on Netflix), reinterprets both the myth and the monster, which unlike many before it, feels newly born rather than repaired. Yes, that means no stitches.

“We didn’t want it to feel like an accident victim,” he said, referring to his collaboration with Mike Hill, also a “Frankenstein” acolyte and the film’s creature designer. “We wanted it to have the purity or translucency of almost like a newborn soul,” del Toro said, “to follow it from being a newborn soul into being — an ‘I think therefore I am’ sort of a human.

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Mark Peplow in Nature:

Many of the molecules in our bodies are ‘chiral’ — that is, they take one of two mirror-image forms, like right-handed and left-handed gloves. Proteins are built from left-handed amino acids, and DNA twists like a right-handed screw, for example.

Studying mirror-image versions of such molecules could help to unpick how this handedness emerged, some researchers say. And because the body’s enzymes and immune system might not as readily recognize right-handed amino acids or left-handed DNA, such molecules could resist degradation — making them useful as therapeutic drugs. This approach has already shown clinical success: in 2017, for example, the US Food and Drug Administration approved a small peptide containing mirror-image amino acids, called etelcalcetide, to treat people with chronic kidney disease.

But this ability to evade degradation could be a double-edged sword. If an entire mirror-image cell were ever made, it might proliferate uncontrollably in the body or spread unchecked through the environment, some researchers say.

This is why scientists are meeting in Manchester this week.

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