Mario Arriagada Cuadriello in the Ideas Letter from Open Society Foundations:

Evita, the Falklands, the Hand of God: if you are an English speaker you have already guessed the subject. For the Spanish-speaking world, the key terms would be different: Peronismo, Malvinas, and, again, Maradona. But irrespective of language there is a more robust set of signifiers that (all too often) effectively describes Argentina’s zeitgeist: Inflation, debt, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). And it’s the last that will be the central protagonist of this story.

Rotten governance in Argentina is undoubtedly to blame for the country’s knocking on the IMF’s door to the point of becoming it largest debtor. But what about the IMF? How are they reacting to newly-inaugurated President Javier Milei’s promise of a radical reboot via old-line shock therapy? In a world in which “we are all post-neoliberals now” (in the way that we were all Keynesians once upon a time) has the progressives’ Darth Vader, the International Monetary Fund, mended its ways? Can it push back against the paleo-austerity ideas of President Milei? Or will the world find out that the world’s last neo-liberal, an Argentine far-right devotee of libertarian economics, is just the ticket for the IMF’s return to form?

Before we go there let’s rewind and travel back to the annus horribilis of 1976. On 29 March, a civilian-military coup deposed Isabel Perón, who had assumed the presidency after her recently returned husband Juan died in 1974, and made Jorge Rafael Videla the de facto president of Argentina.

More here.

Alex Worsnip in Aeon:

…incoherence can hold between mental states of various types: for example, between beliefs, preferences, intentions, or mixtures of more than one of these types. In all cases, though, it’s crucial that the defect is in the combination of states, not necessarily in any of them taken individually. There’s nothing wrong with preferring chocolate ice cream to vanilla, or preferring vanilla to strawberry, or preferring strawberry to chocolate; but there is something very strange about having all of these preferences together.

More here.

Leon Vlieger in The Inquisitive Biologist:

Despite millennia of arguments, the question of whether we have free will or not remains unresolved. Last year October, two neurobiologists stepped into the fray, giving me the chance to dip my toes into the free-will debate. I just reviewed Robert Sapolsky’s Determined which presented a case against. Though successfully showing that we have less of it than we think, I remain unconvinced by his total rejection of free will. For the second half of this two-part review, I turn to Kevin J. Mitchell’s Free Agents which, also starting from neurobiology, presents a tightly argued and compelling case in favour.

More here.

Sam Kahn in Persuasion:

There seem to be two words in the air at the moment, that keep popping up in articles and finding their way into American political discourse. One is “sleepwalking.” The other is “homelessness.”

The “sleepwalking” is obvious enough. After the most consequential election in American history, pitting Biden against Trump, with democracy in the balance, we once again have… the most consequential election in American history, pitting Biden against Trump, with everything even more in the balance and with everybody just that much angrier at each other.

On the Democratic side, the sense is of spending the last year waiting to have what David Brooks calls “The Conversation” about Joe Biden… and never quite getting around to it. None of the major potential rivals were willing to challenge him. He wasn’t willing to step down. And it’s not clear that anybody ever really pushed it—even as Biden’s poll numbers continued to plummet.

On the Republican side, there was the charade of a primary campaign, dutifully covered by the media.

More here.

Leonid Schneider in For Better Science:

Max Kozlov in Nature:

The prestigious Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (DFCI) in Boston, Massachusetts, acknowledged yesterday that it would seek retractions for six papers and corrections for an additional 31 — some co-authored by DFCI chief executive Laurie Glimcher, chief operating officer William Hahn and several other prominent cancer researchers. The news came after scientific-image sleuth Sholto David posted his concerns about more than 50 manuscripts to a blog on 2 January. In the papers, published in a range of journals including Blood, Cell and Nature Immunology, David found Western blots — common tests for detecting proteins in biological samples — where bands seemed to be spliced and stretched. He also found images of mice duplicated across figures where they shouldn’t have been. (Nature’s news team is editorially independent of its publisher, Springer Nature, and of other Nature-branded journals.)

…You recently left your 2,000th comment on PubPeer. What keeps you coming back?

I enjoy the ridiculous back and forth with the authors over e-mail. I care a lot about the animals [whose lives are taken to conduct these experiments] as well. The level of expectation we should have when we’re dealing with animals and high-profile institutions is that they’re super careful and that they get things right, so it’s frustrating when you see errors.

More here.

Musée des Beaux Arts

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just
walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there must always be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Brueghel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure, the sun shone
As it had on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

by W.H. Auden
from Literature and the Writing Process
Prentice Hall, 1996

Jenny Price at The Believer:

There are many places in L.A. you can go to think about the city, and my own favorite has become the Los Angeles River, which looks like an outsize concrete sewer and is most famous for being forgotten. The L.A. River flows fifty-one miles through the heart of L.A. County. It is enjoying herculean efforts to revitalize it, and yet commuters who have driven over it five days a week for ten years cannot tell you where it is. Along the river, the midpoint lies roughly at the confluence with the Arroyo Seco, near Dodger Stadium downtown. L.A. was founded near here in 1781: this area offers the most reliable aboveground supply of freshwater in the L.A. basin. It’s a miserable spot now, a trash-strewn wasteland of empty lots, steel fences, and railroad tracks beneath a tangle of freeway overpasses: it looks like a Blade Runner set that a crew disassembled and then put back together wrong. It’s not the most scenic spot to visit the river but may be the finest place on the river to think about L.A.

more here.

Hanif Abdurraqib at Bookforum:

BEYOND AN OLDER SIBLING’S headphones wringing the sweet, distorted fuzz of the Velvet Underground out and into my ears, my second most notable encounter with Lou Reed was in the pages of the Lester Bangs anthology Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, which has a whole section dedicated to Bangs and his relentless sparring with Reed. A book within a book, almost. There are two interviews that would, today, seem alarming in both their approach and the nature of their candidness, with Bangs demeaning Reed’s pal David Bowie, Reed taking the bait, Bangs shouting that Reed is full of shit. The interviews go on like this, Bangs and Reed clashing, arguing loudly, or with an on-page ferocity that occasionally veered into affection. Reed clamors on about the drugs he consumes to survive, Bangs takes Reed to task for his songwriting’s increasing laziness. Ultimately, in the essays Bangs wrote about Reed, without Reed in the room, we find that these clashes, brutal and invasive as they might have seemed in the interview form, were born out of a writer being present with a subject he admired deeply, growing frustrated that the mythology he’d made of the subject wasn’t being manifested in the person he had been so fascinated by. This frustration inspired some terribly cruel writing that eventually led to a permanent falling-out between the two.

more here.

Kyra Dempsey in Asterisk:

In the aftermath of a disaster, our immediate reaction is often to search for some person to blame. Authorities frequently vow to “find those responsible” and “hold them to account,” as though disasters happen only when some grinning mischief-maker slams a big red button labeled “press for catastrophe.” That’s not to say that negligence ought to go unpunished. Sometimes there really is a malefactor to blame, but equally often there isn’t, and the result is that normal people who just made a mistake are caught up in the dragnet of vengeance, like the famous 2009 case of six Italian seismologists who were charged for failing to predict a deadly earthquake. But when that happens, what is actually accomplished? Has anything been made better? Or have we simply kicked the can down the road?

It’s often much more productive to ask why than to ask who. In some industries, this is called a “blameless postmortem,” and in aviation, it’s a long-standing, internationally formalized tradition.

More here.

Ashutosh Jogalekar at X (the artform formerly known as Twitter):

More here.

Conor McCarthy in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

Edward Said, the 20th anniversary of whose death has just passed, was one of the United States’ greatest literary critics of the last 50 years. But he was also an intellectual, a figure who transcended or stepped beyond his professional location to think and speak publicly, about matters of public import, for and to a public.

Although Said was trained and practiced as a critic-scholar, the socioprofessional category that really interested him was that of the “intellectual.” Said’s interest in intellectuals and in making himself an intellectual—a central concern of his first two books, as Timothy Brennan pointed out years ago—was what enabled him to consider the realm of culture as a major zone of political engagement. For Said, the cultural intellectual could—and should—take on the tasks set by Noam Chomsky, in his 1967 essay “The Responsibility of Intellectuals”: to “speak the truth and to expose lies.”

Said lived up to that responsibility with great seriousness. Even today, his work and positions offer and embody provocations for disciplines where their effects remain yet unfelt. The challenge of considering these resonances lies at the core of political theorist and Oxford professor Jeanne Morefield’s intriguing monograph Unsettling the World: Edward Said and Political Theory (2022). Morefield argues forcefully that although political theory has only referenced Said’s work in passing, his ideas might be used to effect a thorough reworking of the discipline.

More here.

Invisible City

Hasn’t everyone lived in an invisible
And essentially unreal, imaginary city
With beautiful empty buildings on byways
Or sewers called canals filled with
Slopping water and huge coffins offering
Pronged upright musical clefs to the air
As the whole load staggers nobly
Toward the extraordinary, and maybe Venice
Was named for Venus, the gondola
For someone gone over the edge,
Poled politely up and down with art
By fellows in straw hats and jerseys,
Warehouses, churches, and meeting places,
A Bridge of Sighs where lovers and prisoners
Are still confused and identical as in
D.H. Lawrence’s mating of whales poem where
Archangels of bliss cross over a bull’s
Let’s call it his Bridge of Signs,
For in clandestine Venice, as if named
For Venus, although no whales, there are
Waves of blindness, or a gaudy bondage
To which one submits, and life draws
All its lumens from that bridge.

by Kenneth Rosen
from Everyday Seductions
edited by Gary Soto
Ploughshares, Spring, 1995

Benji Jones in Vox:

On a warm day last spring, dozens of protesters gathered outside a shopping center on the west side of Hawaii’s Big Island. They weren’t there to boycott a store or a pipeline or to deride a politician. They came to revolt against a new ban on feeding cats in the parking lot. “Stop starving the cats,” the protesters chanted, according to a local newspaper. The lot outside Queens Marketplace, the shopping center, is home to one of the island’s many colonies of stray, or free-ranging, cats. While there are no formal estimates, experts guess that there are hundreds, if not thousands, of these colonies across Hawaii, each comprising anywhere from a few to more than a hundred felines. Hawaii is, to put it simply, teeming with cats.

These furry strays are descended from, or are themselves, abandoned pet cats, though they’re not really abandoned. Most of them have at least one “colony manager,” a term you’ll hear in Hawaii and elsewhere for locals who provide groups of free-ranging cats with food, water, and even medical care. Sometimes colony managers (or their friends) will also build feeding stations, like the one pictured below. These are self-described do-gooders, common across the Hawaiian islands, who feed cats that don’t live with them.

More here.

Frederik Joelving in Science:

One evening in June 2023, Nicholas Wise, a fluid dynamics researcher at the University of Cambridge who moonlights as a scientific fraud buster, was digging around on shady Facebook groups when he came across something he had never seen before. Wise was all too familiar with offers to sell or buy author slots and reviews on scientific papers—the signs of a busy paper mill. Exploiting the growing pressure on scientists worldwide to amass publications even if they lack resources to undertake quality research, these furtive intermediaries by some accounts pump out tens or even hundreds of thousands of articles every year. Many contain made-up data; others are plagiarized or of low quality. Regardless, authors pay to have their names on them, and the mills can make tidy profits.

But what Wise was seeing this time was new. Rather than targeting potential authors and reviewers, someone who called himself Jack Ben, of a firm whose Chinese name translates to Olive Academic, was going for journal editors—offering large sums of cash to these gatekeepers in return for accepting papers for publication.

More here.

Ala Mohammed Mushtaha in The Free Press:

On Saturday, December 30, our front door was busted down, and twenty masked men barged in and took my father, a widely respected and deeply learned imam here in Gaza.

One dragged him by his head, and another grabbed him by his beard. My younger brother tried to intervene and reason with the kidnappers, but they beat him. I have a medical condition that makes it hard for me to breathe, so all I could do was watch as the horror unfolded.

I know that if Hamas kills my father, they’ll say that the Israeli army did it. But my father was very keen that even if he died, we should make known the despicable demands they made of him. It was his last request to us, literally as he was being carried out of the door, that should he die, we should publicize the real reason for his death, and it is this:

He wouldn’t preach what Hamas told him to. He refused to tell Gazans that violent resistance, and obedience to Hamas, is the best way out of our current hell.

More here.

Steve Nadis in Quanta:

Driverless cars and planes are no longer the stuff of the future. In the city of San Francisco alone, two taxi companies have collectively logged 8 million miles of autonomous driving through August 2023. And more than 850,000 autonomous aerial vehicles, or drones, are registered in the United States — not counting those owned by the military.

But there are legitimate concerns about safety. For example, in a 10-month period that ended in May 2022, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reported nearly 400 crashes involving automobiles using some form of autonomous control. Six people died as a result of these accidents, and five were seriously injured.

The usual way of addressing this issue — sometimes called “testing by exhaustion” — involves testing these systems until you’re satisfied they’re safe. But you can never be sure that this process will uncover all potential flaws.

More here.