Frederick Kaufman at Harper’s Magazine:

Jacob Angeli-Chansley, the man the media has dubbed the QAnon Shaman, had been released from federal custody six weeks before when we met for lunch at a place called Picazzo’s, winner of the Phoenix New Times Best Gluten-Free Restaurant award in 2015. Despite a protracted hunger strike and 317 days isolated in a cell, Jacob’s prison sentence of forty-one months for obstruction of an official proceeding on January 6, 2021, had been shortened owing to good behavior, and he was let out about a year early on supervised release.
It took some doing to get him to sit for an interview, as Jacob is wary of what he calls Operation Mockingbird, an alleged CIA-sponsored effort begun in the Fifties to use mass media to influence public opinion. Jacob believes that people like me are the tools of the Mockingbird operation, of the deep state, international bankers, pharmaceutical cartels, and corporate monarchies that control the world. People like me believe in medicines that are addictive drugs, in food that is poison, in environmentalism that is ecocide, in education that is ignorance, in money that is debt, in objective science that is not objective.
more here.

From St Magnus Cathedral in Kirkwall, a lane once led through fields up to a small patch of grass. In the centre of this green, where formerly stood a stake, there is now a stone slab engraved: ‘in memory of those accused of witchcraft’. Convicted at trials held in the cathedral, the condemned were marched up the lane with hands bound, lashed to the stake and then ‘wyrried’ – that is strangled to death by the public executioner – and burned to ash. Other forms of execution were available; common criminals and traitors might also be wyrried but not reduced to ashes. Burning, however, was ‘cheust’ – ‘just’ – for witches. Yet the witches were otherwise quite undistinguished: ‘they wur cheust folk’ declares the slab’s main inscription in suitably Orcadian spelling.
It was hailed as a potentially transformative technique for measuring brain activity in animals: direct imaging of neuronal activity (DIANA), held the promise of mapping neuronal activity so fast that neurons could be tracked as they fired. But nearly two years on from the
Glazer’s decision to only use hidden cameras, without any artificial lighting, creates formal limitations and challenges. But the images retain an intense tactility: patterns on fabrics, the pull of harshly parted and pinned hair, fuzz on a bee that circles a blossom, the softness of a dog’s muzzle, the glint of light reflected from an extracted human tooth. Close-ups punctuate longer observational takes, asserting the specificity of the surfaces that define this moment. The measured pacing of The Zone of Interest strikes me as distinct from the slow cinema tradition, where duration typically serves as a thematic focus. Instead, the length of the shots serves the function of extending the overarching tension. Glazer’s long takes are often paired with an uncomfortable intensity in the soundscape (perhaps the sonic analogue to an uncomfortable close-up), making these moments less an invitation to haptic reverie than an overwhelming of the senses. Suspense, tension, and a nauseating realization about what remains unseen dominate the affect, increased by the long takes that never fully reveal or resolve. The impact feels similar to the way the mind retains a vividly detailed image of a mundane moment preceding a traumatic event that itself can’t be fully recalled.
We have a sense, I think, of the false border sequestering art from theory. And so to remark on Maggie Nelson’s facility in mating the two is to say the least about how she does so—which is with a hurtling gusto that nonetheless invites us to pause and think. For this, her books are beloved by audiences with varying attachments to the categories that are often, imperfectly, applied to what they are reading: “memoir,” “art criticism,” “poetry,” “queer theory,” “feminism.” This is one way of saying that describing Nelson’s writing can be harder than consuming it, as one of its defining features involves unfurling the shorthand that governs—literally and figuratively—so much of our lives, including the terms we use to identify ourselves.
In 1968
Daniel Kahneman died last week at the age of 90. His legacy is immense. He was, as he put it, the “grandfather” of behavioural economics — think economics but with a realistic model of what a human is — a role which won him a Nobel Prize. But Kahneman’s legacy is bigger than that. Kahneman and Tversky changed how we think about how people think, and if you change that, you change everything. You can see their influence all across the social sciences and much of the humanities.
The detective in a typical British crime procedural would say that
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Odgers recently stated the skeptics’ case in an essay in Nature titled
Equity has become a familiar term on American college campuses in recent years, as well as a flashpoint in the nation’s culture wars.
If the Poetics, Aristotle’s treatise on the subject of tragedy, is rarely studied today, it is largely because the French Neoclassicists of the seventeenth century turned Aristotle’s descriptions of Greek tragedy into prescriptions. Finessed by Corneille and Racine, ignored by Molière, challenged by the Romantics, and rejected by the Modernists, the Poetics was all but forgotten by 1953. But each in his own way, Beckett and Clarke heeded the deeper insights it contains.