Sarah Bell on BBC:

Dani Blum in The New York Times:

Ozempic and other drugs like it have proven powerful at regulating blood sugar and driving weight loss. Now, scientists are exploring whether they might be just as transformative in treating a wide range of other conditions, from addiction and liver disease to a common cause of infertility. “It’s like a snowball that turned into an avalanche,” said Lindsay Allen, a health economist at Northwestern Medicine. As the drugs gain momentum, she said, “they’re leaving behind them this completely reshaped landscape.” Much of the research on other uses of semaglutide, the compound in Ozempic and Wegovy, and tirzepatide, the substance in Mounjaro and Zepbound, is only in the early stages. One of the biggest questions scientists are seeking to answer: Do the benefits of these drugs just boil down to weight loss? Or do they have other effects, like tamping down inflammation in the body or quieting the brain’s compulsive thoughts, that would make it possible to treat far more illnesses?

We won’t likely know anytime soon. “We’re still learning how these medicines work,” said Dr. Daniel Drucker, one of the first researchers to study these drugs. (Dr. Drucker consults for Novo Nordisk, the company that makes Ozempic and Wegovy.) People with the conditions below, many of whom have few good options for treatment, could benefit in the long run if these trials are successful. And for weight-loss drugmakers, every new use could catapult the drugs even further into blockbuster status. Some of these applications — including for heart disease and sleep apnea, which each affects tens of millions of people — have become targets for these companies and could prove especially lucrative. These medications are a “gold mine,” Dr. Allen said. “There is no upper bound for where the market is going.”

More here.

Messiah (Christmas Portions)

A little heat caught
in gleaming rags,
in shrouds of veil,
torn and sun-shot swaddlings:

over the Methodist roof,
two clouds propose a Zion
of their own, blazing
(colors of tarnish on copper)

against the steely close
of a coastal afternoon, December,
while under the steeple
the Choral Society

prepares to perform
Messiah, pouring, in their best
blacks and whites, onto the raked stage.
Not steep, really,

but from here,
the first pew, they’re a looming
cloudbank of familiar angels:
that neighbor who

fights operatically
with her girlfriend, for one,
and the friendly bearded clerk
from the post office

—tenor trapped
in the body of a baritone? Altos
from the A&P, soprano
from the T-shirt shop:

today they’re all poise,
costume and purpose
conveying the right note
of distance and formality.

Silence in the hall,
anticipatory, as if we’re all
about to open a gift we’re not sure
we’ll like;

how could they
compete with sunset’s burnished
oratorio? Thoughts which vanish,
when the violins begin.

Who’d have thought
they’d be so good? Every valley,
proclaims the solo tenor,
(a sleek blonde

I’ve seen somewhere before
—the liquor store?) shall be exalted,
and in his handsome mouth the word
is lifted and opened

Read more »

Zine Magubane at Jacobin:

Kenan Malik’s Not So Black and White: A History of Race From White Supremacy to Identity Politics is a detailed yet broad examination of how race was invented as a logic to organize people’s experience of themselves as well as to channel political activity. The book is organized around four themes: 1) a retelling of the story of race, demonstrating how it emerged as an elite discourse to justify restricting equality and liberty to the few; 2) an exploration of how mass resistance, particularly against slavery, colonialism, and Jim Crow, expanded the ideas of liberty and equality in order to make them truly universal; 3) an examination of the relationship between racial inequality and class inequality, with special attention to how a narrow focus on racial inequality obscures how class exploitation works to produce and reproduce racial inequality; and 4) how identity politics is a form of class politics that operates with equal perniciousness on the Right and the Left. Not So Black and White is not only a searing indictment of how “our preoccupation with race frequently hides the realities of injustice,” it is also a call for a different kind of politics — one that is class-based and worker-focused — to free us from the prison of identity. Although the book is not explicitly framed as a critique of epistemology, it is a provocation to think even more critically about analytical categories and the politics of historiography. Not So Black and White invites us to evaluate how race has become not only the primary way to organize political life but also the preferred epistemological category for explaining the march of history. As such, it demonstrates that debates over historiography and epistemology are not simply of academic interest. They are informed by class politics and are weapons in political struggle.

More here.

Lars Erik Schönander in The New Atlantis:

Any time you walk outside, satellites may be watching you from space. There are currently more than 8,000 active satellites in orbit, including over a thousand designed to observe the Earth.

Satellite technology has come a long way since its secretive inception during the Cold War, when a country’s ability to successfully operate satellites meant not only that it was capable of launching rockets into Earth orbit but that it had eyes in the sky. Today not only governments across the world but private enterprises too launch satellites, collect and analyze satellite imagery, and sell it to a range of customers, from government agencies to the person on the street. SpaceX’s Starlink satellites bring the Internet to places where conventional coverage is spotty or compromised. Satellite data allows the United States to track rogue ships and North Korean missile launches, while scientists track wildfires, floods, and changes in forest cover.

The industry’s biggest technical challenge, aside from acquiring the satellite imagery itself, has always been to analyze and interpret it. This is why new AI tools are set to drastically change how satellite imagery is used — and who uses it.

More here.

Monica Duffy Toft in The Conversation:

The ongoing horrors unfolding in Israel and Gaza have deep-rooted origins that stem from a complex and contested question: Who has rights to the same territory?

I am a scholar of international affairs, as well as territory and nationalism. Territory has been a central cause of conflict throughout history.

Today, Israelis and Palestinians both claim the same swath of land as their own. Each group has its own historical narratives, its own names for the territory – Israel or Palestine, depending on whom you ask – and many people from each group believe strongly that sharing the land is impossible.

Palestinians and Israelis also look to this same land as a way to define their identities and protect their futures.

More here.

Laura Kipnis in Critical Quarterly:

In 2010, when a book I’d written called How to Become a Scandal was going to press, my editor contacted Christopher to ask for a blurb. He sent back three choices, the first of which read, ‘Laura Kipnis promised me a blowjob if I endorsed her latest triumph, which I hereby warmly and devotedly do.’ I’m sure it says nothing good about me that I found this funny, especially since using it would have so perfectly – and devilishly – enacted the premise of the book. Though generally no prig, sadly my editor insisted we go with the more conventional third option (the second was a double entendre about a now mostly forgotten Republican senator caught in a clumsy men’s room encounter). She did forward me their subsequent correspondence: ‘Christopher – you are a scream!’ she’d written back, to which he responded, ‘Yeah? Well a lot depends on which one she picks.’

I can be as humourless as the next leftwing feminist but for some reason Christopher’s, what to call it – lasciviousness? antiquarianism? – amused more than offended me, though his public anti-abortion stance was noxious and, one suspects, hypocritical. Colour me surprised if that particular edict was upheld in practice. In any case, I never thought of him as someone you’d go to for instruction on feminism, and increasingly not on any political question, yet it was perplexingly hard to hold his bad politics against him.

More here.

Joelle M. Abi-Rached in Boston Review:

The face of the ongoing onslaught on Gaza has no doubt been Dr. Hammam Alloh, the thirty-six-year-old Palestinian nephrologist at northern Gaza’s Al-Shifa Hospital who refused to evacuate it when it was invaded by Israeli troops. “And if I go, who treats my patients?” he said in an October 31 interview. “We are not animals. We have the right to receive proper healthcare,” he added. Two weeks later, Alloh was killed by an Israeli airstrike, along with his father, brother-in-law, and father-in-law.

Alloh’s use of the word “animals” was certainly not lost on viewers. Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant had used that same language on October 9 when he announced a “complete siege” on Gaza, labeling its residents as “human animals.” Hamas’s attacks on October 7 would predictably generate a violent military reaction from Israel. But this Israeli campaign in Gaza, a strip of land where more than 80 percent of its population lived in poverty even before October 7, has been of a different character entirely than any previous ones. This onslaught has featured direct attacks on hospitals and the intentional undermining of the entire health care system: shelling, the killing and arresting of health care personnel, the direct and indirect killing of hundreds of patients, underprovision or complete lack of proper medical care, and unwarranted suffering for thousands of patients due to shortages in basic medications, water, food, and fuel. The attacks have made clear that the repression of Palestinian rights now has a new feature: the systematic destruction of the very institutions that sustain life.

More here.

Maria Haro Sly in Phenomenal World:

Since the early 2000s, Argentine development finance has undergone a profound transformation. Amid cyclical debt defaults and endless negotiations with Western investors and the IMF, Chinese overseas investment loans have slowly crept to the fore. Between 2007 and 2020, Argentina received $10.65 billion in investment from Chinese companies, concentrated in the energy, mining, and financial sectors. Today, Argentina is the fourth-largest recipient of Chinese loans in the region, securing around $17 billion in total. These loans have primarily supported transportation infrastructure, energy projects, and the enhancement of Argentine exports. In 2022, President Alberto Fernández agreed to open financing lines with China totaling nearly $23 billion through the Strategic Dialogue for Economic Cooperation and Coordination (DECCE) and Belt and Road Initiative, though the latter is still pending activation.

It’s within this changing borrowing landscape that Javier Milei, the self-defined “first true free-trade reformer and libertarian president in the history of the world,” has been elected. Milei won the ballot against the former Minister of Finance, Sergio Massa, in a country with 140 percent inflation rate and plummeting exports thanks to a drought that resulted in a $19 billion loss, nearly 3 percent of Argentina’s GDP.

Economically, Milei raises a sense of déjà vu reminiscent of neoliberal figures from the 1970s, 1990s, and the Macri era. His political party and cabinet are drawn from earlier administrations, with figures like Ricardo Bussi (son of the dictator and governor of the Tucuman Province), and members from Menem’s administration, including Menem’s nephew, Martín Menem, as president of the Senate. Notably, a significant number of former ministers from Macri’s government—Patricia Bullrich, Luis Caputo, Santiago Bausili, among others—have also joined Milei’s cabinet.

More here.

Nick Romeo in The New Yorker:

Around five years ago, David—a pseudonym—realized that he was fighting with his girlfriend all the time. On their first date, he had told her that he hoped to have sex with a thousand women before he died. They’d eventually agreed to have an exclusive relationship, but monogamy remained a source of tension. “I always used to tell her how much it bothered me,” he recalled. “I was an asshole.” An Israeli man now in his mid-thirties, David felt conflicted about other life issues. Did he want kids? How much should he prioritize making money? In his twenties, he’d tried psychotherapy several times; he would see a therapist for a few months, grow frustrated, stop, then repeat the cycle. He developed a theory. The therapists he saw wanted to help him become better adjusted given his current world view—but perhaps his world view was wrong. He wanted to examine how defensible his values were in the first place.

One day, a housemate showed him a book called “Philosophy, Humor, and the Human Condition,” by the French Israeli philosopher Lydia Amir. Amir, the housemate explained, was his cousin. In addition to teaching part-time at Tufts University, she offered “philosophical counselling” to private clients. David had never heard of philosophical counselling. But over the next few weeks he read and enjoyed Amir’s book. He watched an episode of an Israeli current-affairs TV show, “London and Kirschenbaum,” in which she debated the merits of philosophical counselling with the hosts. “She actually looked like she enjoyed it when they tried to take her down,” David said. He decided to contact her, and they arranged some online sessions.

More here.

Becca Rothfeld in The Washington Post:

David Shariatmadari at The Guardian:

“King of New York” was the epithet given to him by David Bowie, an obsessive Velvets fan who rescued Reed’s lacklustre solo career by producing Transformer, which spawned his biggest hit, Walk on the Wild Side. It’s also the title of Will Hermes’s meticulous yet vivid new biography, the first to draw on the archive donated to the New York Public Library by Reed’s widow Laurie Anderson. As in his 2011 book Love Goes to Buildings on Fire, about the city’s mid-70s musical landscape, Hermes expertly conjures the different scenes Reed inhabited, placing him amid a rich cast of collaborators, friends and lovers.

There’s a sense that he’s updating Reed for a new generation, particularly as a prophet of queer liberation and gender nonconformity. This isn’t a stretch: one of his best songs, 1969’s Candy Says, is an achingly poignant evocation of gender dysphoria, among other things. On 1972’s Make Up, three years after the Stonewall riots, he proclaimed “Now we’re coming out, out of our closets / Out on the streets”.

more here.

Lauren Christensen at the NYT:

Forget everything you’ve ever heard about less being more, about economy of syntax, about the read-between-the-lines profundity of wide-margined, double-spaced “spare prose.” To read a paragraph by Henry James — a single one can sprawl across pages — is to luxuriate in linguistic excess.

An American expatriate who spent his adulthood in England, James (1843-1916) was the patron saint of exquisite verbosity; of circuitous, compulsively sub-claused sentences that contain all the twists and adventures his story lines lack. Reading the prodigious body of fiction he produced over four decades, between 1871 and 1911, you get the sense he lost himself so deeply in his recurrent themes — the innocence of America versus the experience and depravity of Europe, the psychological richness of everyday life — that he couldn’t help carrying on.

This applied to his nonfiction, too. James didn’t just write novels; he wrote about writing novels, obsessing over his craft the way his characters obsess over the minutiae of their lives.

more here.

It was Beginning Winter

It was beginning winter
An in-between time,
The landscape still partly brown;
The bones of weeds kept swinging in the wind
Above the blue snow.
It was beginning winter.

The light moved slowly over the frozen field,
Over the dry seed crowns,
The beautiful surviving bones
Swinging in the wind.
Light traveled over the wide field;
stayed.

The weeds stopped swinging.
The mind moved, not alone,
Through the clear air, in the silence.

Was it light?
Was it light within?
Was it light within light?
Stillness becoming alive,
Yet still?

A lively understandable spirit
One entertained you.

It will come again.
Be still.

Wait.

by Theodore Roethke

Stuart McGurk in The New Statesman:

Police officers are often the last to know when someone is being conned. A worried son might spot unusual payments on his elderly father’s bank statement. A concerned friend will do a reverse-image search on a suspiciously good-looking dating-app match. A fraudster will run out of excuses as to why they can’t meet. A horrible realisation will dawn and a report will be filed.

More here.

Mariella Rudi in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

Goo. Gunk. Gloop. Gak. By its own definition, slime is hard to grasp. As an object of disgust, it represents our fears and stigmas, the unknown Other. As a toy or sight gag, it’s a silly plaything. It’s easy to forget that slime permeates every living being on Earth, that, like the cosmos or fungi, slime’s existence is vital to our own, a biological imperative as much as oxygen or sunlight. Nebulous and omnipresent, deathless and primordial, slime is an essential link between nonliving matter and the first life that developed in the ocean 3.6 billion years ago. Slime molds are at least millions of years old and can thrive in outer space. The granddaddy of all mankind, slime is everywhere. It’s also easy to miss, which helps explain why we’re often so afraid of it.

Capturing the world’s most misunderstood, slippery substance is thus no easy task. Two books published in the last year have tried: Susanne Wedlich’s Slime: A Natural History, and File Under: Slime by Christopher Michlig. These books ooze praise thickened by arguments as far-flung and mutable as their shared subject. Both trace a sleek line through art, fashion, literature, film, science, commerce, and beyond, offering mature takes on a childhood fixation.

More here.