From VOI:
JAKARTA – Amid the excitement of the World Governments Summit (WGS) 2026 in Dubai, United Arab Emirates (UAE), a forum usually filled with majestic speeches, technological futurism and discussions of world leaders, there was a guest whose presence was the most silent, but his message was the most resounding. Nolan is the first human to receive a Neuralink brain implant, a breakthrough that has only been present in science fiction books. And in the forum held on February 3-5, Nolan brought a simple sentence: “This technology has brought my life back.” Nolan still remembers the day he was told he would be the first subject in human history to undergo a Neuralink implant. There were no tears, no long pauses like in a movie scene. There was urgency.
“Everything happened very quickly. All we think about is logistics: what to prepare, how to get there. But in my heart, I think about the possibilities. I think it will be fun, and I want to help people,” he said on the sidelines of the WGS 2026 event, as quoted Friday (6/2). The decision was not an easy one for someone living with quadriplegia, a condition that left him paralyzed from the neck down after an accident years ago. But for Nolan, the courage came from one thing: the belief that his life could still be of benefit.
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We are born with a yearning for the spiritual and transcendent, and the difficult truths about life that we learn about as we grow older—such as the inevitability of death and the existence of terrible injustices—further push us towards faith. Without religion, or something close enough to religion, we are unhappy and unsatisfied. Blaise Pascal was wise when he said that secular pursuits can’t quench our thirst—“the infinite abyss can only be filled by an infinite and immutable object, that is to say, only by God Himself.” As it’s sometimes put, there is a God-shaped hole that we all need to fill.
We are only a month into 2026, yet it’s already clear what one of the major space stories of the year is going to be: mega-constellations, and the ongoing attempts to launch thousands of satellites into Earth’s orbit.
In August 1968, a visiting foreign minister from Pakistan, Mian Arshad Hussain, gave Mao a box of mangoes as a gift during a state visit. Presenting mangoes has a long tradition in Pakistan, but in China, the fruit was virtually unknown. Mao passed the box to workers occupying the Tsinghua campus in Beijing, who were attempting to control the Red Guards stationed there. The scholar of Chinese visual culture Alfreda Murck 
David Foster Wallace’s “
Why bother? What’s the point? These are questions that inevitably arise in conversations about college programs in prisons. But these questions make certain assumptions about education in general and higher education in prisons specifically. What is it, exactly, that is not worth it, according to skeptics and naysayers, about college education in prison? Ought we not to consider just what the point of education is in the first place? My position as a prisoner has given me the opportunity to contemplate the question and arrive at some insight into it.
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Which country has the highest rates of diabetes? Many people would guess the United States. Perhaps Canada or Australia? Mexico? The United Kingdom?
Investigating the crypto-religious is Elie’s venture in this book. Readers of Elie’s first two books, 
In the genre of sanatorium literature, An Infinite Sadness stands apart. It doesn’t have much of the fellow feeling that defines Thomas Mann’s classic The Magic Mountain (1924), in which Hans Castorp, bowled over by love and intellectual companionship, struggles to leave the Berghof hospital. In Christa Wolf’s August (2012), the protagonist reflects on the affecting compassion of a fellow resident in a TB clinic, while in Ken Kesey’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962), the bonds among the patients form the basis of their resistance to institutional authority. Alphonse Daudet, while seeking relief from spinal pain in a thermal spa, wrote that “the patients, in all their weirdness and diversity, draw comfort from the demonstration that their respective illnesses all have something in common.” Stories set in sanatoriums tend to show their characters slowly settling into their new homes, the world slipping away, time taking on different proportions. Separated from the imperatives of productivity, the sanatorium is an imaginative space in which the future is null and progress uncertain. As sickness becomes the rule instead of the exception, the patient begins to exist authentically, in a reality defined by a community of fellow sufferers.
I am not writing this essay as an author, nor as an activist, nor as a representative of the Iranian people. I am writing this as the daughter of former dissidents who lost the best days of their lives in the prisons of the Islamic Republic. As the daughter of a woman who was forced to give birth behind bars, interrogated while going through labor. As the niece of a man executed on a summer morning alongside thousands of others, his body swallowed by an unmarked mass grave. As the granddaughter of working-class grandparents who endured endless humiliations and hardships to raise grandchildren whose parents languished in the regime’s houses of horror.
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