Corey Robin at his own website:
In a way I’ve never experienced in my life, I feel in synch with a political turn, felt by millions of voters, that’s now being reflected in the voice of one of the most dynamic leaders we’ve seen in a long time.
Which leads me now to a bit of a personal/political memoir, which may resonate with other leftists of my age, with those of us who are part of lost generation of progressives, the Gen X leftists, who’ve mostly felt out of step for virtually every political development of our adult lives.
In the last few years, I’ve noticed a change in my political writing, prompted by the surge of enshittification, the rise of AI, and the concomitant erosion of academic and cultural standards. I found myself increasingly focusing my political writing on the importance of excellence for the left, on pushing for the highest standards of teaching and writing and work, not as a punishment for the poor or as an excuse for excluding subjugated groups, but as an aspiration of a genuinely democratic society, as something everybody wants for themselves and the people around them.
More here.
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Pepys was a meticulous – some might say compulsive – record-keeper, and his talent for storing and retrieving vast amounts of information would be useful to him throughout his career. Loveman argues that the diary became his ‘catch-all’ for anything he couldn’t safely or conveniently note in his official or household accounts. Into its pages went social debts (who had given him dinner, who still owed him one), gossip, the music he heard and the plays he saw, and the most intimate aspects of his life, from bodily functions (including what has been called ‘one of the best documented attacks of flatulence in history’) to sex.
The Roman sage Marcus Aurelius said we should never let the future disturb us. But then he never had a conversation with the futurologist Nick Bostrom about the state of the world in 2050. “There’s a good likelihood that by 2050, all scientific research will be done by superintelligent AI rather than human researchers,” Bostrom said in an e-mail. “Some humans might do science as a hobby, but they wouldn’t be making any useful contributions.” Time to rethink your career options, Nature readers!
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“I don’t have a clear-cut film identity,” Rob Reiner 
International chess masters, Olympic gold medallists and Nobel prize-winning scientists were rarely child prodigies, a review reveals. Likewise, early 
As an American reporter living in Beijing, I’ve watched both China and the rest of the world flirt with cutting-edge technologies involving robots, drones and self-driving vehicles.
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The Hungarian poet Géza Röhrig, the Shark Tank shark Kevin O’Leary, and Timothée Chalamet walk into a bar. The bar is the restaurant of the London Ritz, and it’s 1952. Gwyneth Paltrow is also there, at another table. O’Leary, playing the part of the ink tycoon Milton Rockwell in Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme, notices the tattoo on the arm of Röhrig’s character, Béla Kletzki. “He used to defuse bombs for the Nazis,” says Timothée, as the ping-pong ingenue Marty Mauser. “Tell ’em the story you told me.” “My guests are waiting,” Rockwell replies. “Wait,” says Marty, “you’re gonna love this.”
Traditionally, autumn is when publishers bring out their most ambitious novels: the buzziest debuts, the most hotly anticipated returns, the heaviest hitters. This year, many of them were also physically heavy, with page counts that climbed, dizzyingly, into the high hundreds and even four digits. (One independent press told us that producing these books broke their printer.)
On the Well desk, we see a lot of exercise fads. And while all movement is good, plenty of trending workouts