Maureen Dowd in The New York Times:

“It looked like a good thing: but wait till I tell you.”

That’s the opening of the classic O. Henry short story “The Ransom of Red Chief.” The tale, written in 1907, is the ultimate parable about the perils of trying to seize and control a hellion so devious, so maniacal, so awful that the captors become the captives.

The story is about two small-time crooks who think they can make some easy money by kidnapping a 10-year-old boy, the son of an affluent landowner in a sleepy Alabama town. They underestimate badly. When they go to abduct the red-haired, freckle-faced boy, he is throwing rocks at a kitten and hurls a brick at one of his kidnappers. “Red Chief, the terror of the plains,” as the boy calls himself, runs his captors ragged. He relishes tormenting the men and doesn’t want to go home. In the end, they have to drop their demand for a $2,000 ransom, pay the boy’s father $250 to take the demonic child off their hands and run for the hills.

President Trump went along with Bibi Netanyahu’s Panglossian case for slamming Iran. It looked like a good thing: but wait till I tell you.

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I’m doing a little straightening up and find this in an old notebook.
(I tidy it up a bit instead of the room.) —Nils

Time No Longer Marches

Small Morning Poem

Sweet to lie in bed
with a notebook of good paper
and a pen which writes without
skip or complaint.

A new small dog lies
like a gray puddle by my side,
its fur that of a Persian lamb coat
worn by a 1950’s starlet on the cover
of Life magazine.

The old dog, sleeping more each day,
flops on a rug before a glass door
through which the sun makes
an easy morning entrance.

Day ahead filled with too much,
but now I lie among a clutch
of poems watching the pen make its way
to the bottom of the page.

At the end of the notebook, this is what I find:

My small dog Willa, when told she was being freed
to run in the stars with Orion said she’ll rather
hang about the hearth with Hestia.

by Nils Peterson
—in a time before this

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Morgan Meis at Close Reading:

I’ve never actually seen Arnold Böcklin’s famous but now not really all that famous, let’s say once-famous and now fairly obscure painting known as Die Toteninsel, or The Isle of the Dead. I haven’t seen it in person. There is a version of the painting, I guess Böcklin painted a number of versions of the painting since they kept getting destroyed by wars and other annoying events, but there is a version of the painting at the art museum in Leipzig and I kick myself that I was in Leipzig not that long ago, a couple of years ago and completely and utterly failed to go see the painting. I wasn’t just in Leipzig, I was in Leipzig partly to see a big exhibit of Caspar David Friedrich paintings and could easily just have walked over and seen the Böcklin.

In retrospect, I suppose I didn’t even bother to find out what other important paintings and works of visual art were in Leipzig because I didn’t want to know. I only ever have a fairly small amount of looking in my system, I guess you could say, and I wanted, rather zealously and also somewhat self-protectively, I wanted to reserve all my looking-energy for the Friedrich paintings. This was probably a good idea, in retrospect.

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Ethan Mollick at One Useful Thing:

I had early access to GPT-5.51, and I think it is a big deal. It is a big deal because it indicates that we are not done with the rapid improvement in AI. It is also a big deal because it is just plain good. And it is a big deal because even with all of this, the frontier of AI ability remains jagged.

It is increasingly hard to quickly demonstrate each generational change as AI has gotten better, since a lot of the old things AI was bad at, like math or counting letters in words, are now trivial for AI to do. So, I will give you the complicated details, but first, a simple example that I think is a good illustration. What AI models are best at is coding, so I gave a coding challenge to AIs ranging from OpenAI’s first reasoning model, o3 (released a year and a week ago!) to the current best open weights model (Kimi K2.6) to the new GPT-5.5 Pro…

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Quico Toro at Persuasion:

I’m a climate activist, but I don’t think climate is the most important thing. Not really.

I care about climate because I care about human flourishing, and an out-of-control climate makes human flourishing very hard. A stable climate is a really important means, but it’s not in itself an end.

That seems like a pretty milquetoast position, but it’s weirdly divisive in climate circles. Much of the climate left seems to want to prioritize climate stability even at the cost of human flourishing. The recently departed Paul Ehrlich (who infamously predicted that the world was facing a “population bomb”) was probably the paradigmatic example of this brand of anti-humanist environmentalism. Anytime you hear people worry about the climate impacts of having children, you’re face to face with this strand of thinking.

That makes no sense to me. I’m for people first, climate stability second.

If your first concern is for human flourishing, the thing to worry about is poverty.

More here.

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C. Brandon Ogbunu in Undark Magazine:

During the fall semester of 2025, I taught a graduate seminar entitled “Darwinian Thought and Society.” While teaching should always derive from generosity and a desire to share knowledge, my motivations were partly selfish. The course was an opportunity for me to re-engage with Darwin’s foundational ideas in the company of some of the brightest junior scientists that I’ve ever come across.

The conversations around the first book we read, Darwin’s 1859 “On the Origin of Species,” were mostly familiar ones. We often discussed his use of evidence and his voluminous knowledge of natural history. But other features stood out. For example, the manner in which the book delivered its theoretical argument is unlike what scientific opuses do today. The book contains no equations and only a single figure, a diagram often described as the world’s first phylogenetic tree. It contains no detailed experimental design. There are no statistical methods, or power calculations. Yet the ideas in it are among the most radical and dangerous in the Western canon. In 2026, science has been forced into a deep reflection phase with regard to its present and its future. Revisiting Darwin offers useful lessons for the terrain we now occupy.

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Rachel Fieldhouse in Nature:

The beating of the heart stops cancers from growing in this organ in mice, reports a study published today in Science¹. This could explain why tumours affecting the heart are so rare in mammals, including in people.

Almost all organs and tissues in the body can develop tumours, but cancers that affect the heart are seldom observed. In people, primary cardiac tumours have been identified in fewer than 1% of autopsies, while secondary cancers, in which the primary tumour occurs in a different part of the body, have been found in up to 18% of autopsies. Until now, there has not been a satisfactory explanation for why cardiac tumours are so uncommon, says James Chong, a cardiologist and researcher at the University of Sydney, Australia. This latest study puts forward a compelling case that mechanical strain on the heart could be an explanation, he says.

Serena Zacchigna, a clinician-scientist at the University of Trieste, Italy, and her team transplanted hearts onto the necks of genetically modified mice. These external hearts did not beat but did still receive a blood supply and were functional. The team then injected cancer cells into the transplanted hearts on the necks of mice and into the ‘native’ hearts in the animals. Within two weeks, the cancer cells multiplied and replaced most of the healthy cells in the transplanted hearts. By contrast, about 20% of tissue in the native hearts was cancerous.

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Hope

—an excerpt

Hope is with you when you believe
The earth is not a dream but living flesh,
That sight, touch, and hearing do not lie,
That all things you have ever seen here
Are like a garden looked at from a gate.
You cannot enter. But you’re sure it’s there.
Could we but look more clearly and wisely
We might discover somewhere in the garden
A strange new flower and an unnamed star.

Your past as a garden and the you, now,
sitting there reading this, are at the gate
looking over at it or can be. And the lovely idea
that if we look carefully we might find “a strange
new flower and [or] an unnamed star which we missed
when we passed by the first time. Was it a word, or look,
or a doing that we didn’t recognize as a flower?
Did it blossom after we passed by and that is why
we recognize it only when thinking back?

by Czesław Milosz

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Scott Alexander at Astral Codex Ten:

1: Against microdishonesty

Sasha Chapin has a piece If You Have Writer’s Block, Maybe Stop Lying To Yourself. Maybe lying gives Sasha writer’s block, but for my last set of mentees it more often just made things sound awkward and unclear. The English language hates the slightest whiff of dishonesty, even levels so small you wouldn’t naturally notice them yourself. It punishes you by making your writing worse.

I remember asking one of my mentees to take out a tangential paragraph that didn’t really connect to the rest of the argument. They refused, and awkwardly admitted that it was the one thing they really wanted to say with the essay. They’d written the essay about something else, because the other thing was more presentable. Then they’d smuggled their actual point in as a payload. Clever plan, but your readers will notice.

More here.

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Nathan Gardels at Noema:

It is a mark of the paucity of social imagination among America’s political class, whether a supine Congress beholden to the president’s personality cult or the moribund Democratic Party bereft of fresh ideas, that thinking through the big picture of a new social contract for the Age of AI has been left to the Big Tech disrupters themselves.

Obviously, one must take with a wary grain of silicon whatever Big Tech proposes on the warranted suspicion that it will primarily serve their self-interest. Yet when a company like Anthropic, for example, pushes back against the Pentagon over the use of its frontier models for mass surveillance and autonomous weapons, its principled stance is worthy of embrace.

It is in this context that OpenAI’s proposed “Industrial Policy For The Intelligence Age: Ideas To Keep People First,” released last week, should be taken seriously. It is more visionary and comprehensive than anything that’s emerged so far from the sluggish precincts of public policymakers.

More here.

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More info here.

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Francis Fukuyama at Persuasion:

Now that Donald Trump is visibly weakening, it’s important to start thinking seriously about what comes after him. It’s no secret that I’ve been a big fan of the Abundance movement, which was popularized by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson last year in a book by that name. The core of Abundance is to rebuild American state capacity and create a government that can build things once again. At the top of the list are housing and infrastructure—public goods that will make significant dents in the affordability crisis for ordinary Americans.

Over the past several decades, the United States has lost state capacity, a void that has been most apparent in its failure to build things. There is a huge deficit today in maintenance of our existing roads, bridges, and public utility systems, not to mention new things that we would like to have, like high-speed rail.

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Gerald Holton at The MIT Reader:

In 1929, Boston’s Cardinal O’Connell branded Einstein’s theory of relativity as “befogged speculation producing universal doubt about God and His Creation,” and as implying “the ghastly apparition of atheism.” In alarm, New York’s Rabbi Herbert S. Goldstein asked Einstein by telegram: “Do you believe in God? Stop. Answer paid 50 words.”

In his response, for which Einstein needed but 25 (German) words, he stated his beliefs succinctly: “I believe in Spinoza’s God, Who reveals Himself in the lawful harmony of the world, not in a God Who concerns Himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.” The rabbi cited this as evidence that Einstein was not an atheist, and further declared that “Einstein’s theory, if carried to its logical conclusion, would bring to mankind a scientific formula for monotheism.” Einstein wisely remained silent on that point.

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Elias Canetti at Salmagundi:

February 15, 1942
Today I decided that I will record thoughts against death as they happen to occur to me, without any kind of structure and without submitting them to any tyrannical plan. I cannot let this war pass without hammering out a weapon within my heart that will conquer death. It will be tortuous and insidious, perfectly suited to it. In better times I would wield it as a joke or a brazen threat. I think of the act of slaying death as a masquerade. Employing fifty disguises and numerous plots is how I’d do it. But now death has switched masks yet again. No longer content with its ongoing daily victory, death grabs whatever it can. It riddles the air and the seas; whether the smallest or the largest, it doesn’t matter, for it wants it all, and it has no time for anything else. Nor do I have any time. I have to nab it wherever I can, nail it here and there in first-rate sentences. At the moment I cannot house it in any coffins, much less embalm it, much less lay the embalmed to rest in a gated mausoleum.
Pascal was 39 years old when he died, I will soon be 37. That means I have barely two years left, which isn’t much time! He left behind his scattered defense of Christianity. I want to gather my thoughts on the defense of the human in the face of death.

more here.

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From The Washington Post:

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David Wallace-Wells in The New York Times:

For Zohran Mamdani, it has been a pretty sunny start.

A Siena poll in late January found that the mayor had the approval of 68 percent of New York City — almost 18 percentage points more than he got in the November election and good enough for a net approval of plus 48. This put him in rarefied air alongside San Francisco’s Daniel Lurie, who more than a year into his mayoralty has been given credit for a profound turnaround in the city and who looks perhaps like the country’s most popular elected official. In February, after some frustrating snow, Mamdani’s approval dipped slightly, to 63 percent. His net approval was still higher than anything Eric Adams notched during the giddy period when he was being celebrated as a future face of the national Democratic Party. It’s better than Michael Bloomberg ever managed, according to Marist, and in a political era widely seen to be drowning in negativity.

More here.

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Earth day

things are made of skittish elements caught in earth,
earth and air making sand,
earth and water – clay,
earth and fire
rubies, diamonds, emeralds,

earth gives to things
a slow lastingness
making place possible

a poet’s words
are a kind of earth
giving a shape,
“a “local habitation”
to “airy nothingness”
bringing to thought and feeling
the “prodigious materiality”
of consonant and vowel

jewels,  if you will

by Nils Peterson

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