Rachel Pearson in Harper’s Magazine:

Snow fell all day while a baby was dying. I cannot remember if it was a boy or a girl, so imagine a girl. This was years ago now. The baby had pneumonia. A few weeks into a tenuous life, her lungs were so clogged that they could hardly move oxygen into the blood or carbon dioxide out. The baby’s little heart, trying desperately to pump blood through those lungs, began to fail.

The neonatology unit was on an upper floor, with tall windows and glass doors. You could see clear across the unit and then out through the high windows to the world, where a storm was coming in from over the ocean. In the baby’s room, machines accumulated, along with all the attendants who cared for the machines. There were chairs so the baby’s parents could rest a moment, and as things progressed, a couch was brought in, then more chairs, where the doctors could sit to share serious news.

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From The Washington Post:

Gary Patti leaned in to study the rows of plastic tanks, where dozens of translucent zebrafish flickered through chemically treated water. Each tank contained a different substance — some notorious, others less well understood — all known or suspected carcinogens. Patti’s team is watching them closely, tracking which fish develop tumors, to try to find clues to one of the most unsettling medical puzzles of our time: Why are so many young people getting cancer?

The trend began with younger members of Generation X but is now most visible among millennials, who are being diagnosed in their 20s, 30s, and early 40s — decades earlier than past generations. Medications taken during pregnancy, the spread of ultra-processed foods, disruptions to circadian rhythms — caused by late-night work, global travel and omnipresent screens — and the proliferation of synthetic chemicals are all under scrutiny. Older Americans are still more likely to be diagnosed than younger ones. But cancer rates among those aged 15 to 49 have increased by 10 percent since 2000 even as they have fallen among older people, according to a Washington Post examination of federal data.

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Kevin Power in The Guardian:

The sheer Englishness of Ian McEwan’s fiction may not be fully visible to his English readers. But it is clearly, and amusingly, visible to at least this Irish reader. It isn’t just McEwan’s elegiac, indeed patriotic, attentiveness to English landscapes – to the wildflowers and hedgerows and crags, to the “infinite shingle” of Chesil Beach, to the Chilterns turkey oak in the first paragraph of Enduring Love. Nor is it merely the ferocious home counties middle-classness of his later novels, in which every significant character is at the very least a neurosurgeon or a high court judge, everyone is conversant with Proust, Bach and Wordsworth, and members of the lower orders tend to appear as worrying upstarts from a world in which nobody plonks out the Goldberg Variations on the family baby grand. No, McEwan’s Englishness has most to do with his scrupulously rational, but occasionally and endearingly purblind, liberal morality: England’s most admirable, and most irritating, gift to politics and art.

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Blaise Agüera y Arcas at The MIT Press Reader:

In 1994, a strange, pixelated machine came to life on a computer screen. It read a string of instructions, copied them, and built a clone of itself — just as the Hungarian-American Polymath John von Neumann had predicted half a century earlier. It was a striking demonstration of a profound idea: that life, at its core, might be computational.

Although this is seldom fully appreciated, von Neumann was one of the first to establish a deep link between life and computation. Reproduction, like computation, he showed, could be carried out by machines following coded instructions. In his model, based on Alan Turing’s Universal Machine, self-replicating systems read and execute instructions much like DNA does: “if the next instruction is the codon CGA, then add an arginine to the protein under construction.” It’s not a metaphor to call DNA a “program” — that is literally the case.

Of course, there are meaningful differences between biological computing and the kind of digital computing done by a personal computer or your smartphone.

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Steven Pinker at Persuasion:

“The Emperor’s New Clothes” dramatizes two features of common knowledge that make it not just a mind-blowing logical concept but a key to understanding human social life. One is that common knowledge need not be deduced from an infinite chain of musings about other people’s mental states (“I know that you know that I know that you know…”), which no mortal could ever think. It can be instantly imparted by a conspicuous event, like a plain sentence uttered in public.

The other is that the difference between private knowledge, even when widely shared, and common knowledge is not a mere logical nicety. It can unify knowers in coordinated action and sometimes explode a social status quo.

One of the best jokes from the vein of subversive humor in the Soviet Union has a man standing in the Moscow train station handing out leaflets to passersby. Soon enough the KGB arrest him, only to discover that the leaflets are blank sheets of paper. “What is the meaning of this?” they demand. The man replies, “What is there to write? It’s so obvious!” The point of the joke is that the pamphleteer was generating common knowledge.

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Armour, Mai-Duc, Maxmen, and Allen in Undark Magazine:

States and medical societies that long worked in concert with the CDC are breaking with federal recommendations, saying they no longer have faith in them amid the turmoil and Kennedy’s criticism of vaccines. Roughly seven months after Kennedy’s nomination was confirmed, they’re rushing to draft or release their own vaccine recommendations, while new groups are forming to issue immunization guidance and advice.

How the new system will work is still being hammered out. Vaccine recommendations from states, medical societies, and other groups are likely to diverge, creating dueling guidance and requirements. Schoolchildren in New York may still generally need immunizations, for example, while others in places such as Florida may not need many vaccines.

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Laura Spinney in Nature:

When Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés arrived in Mexico in 1519, he found monarchs, cities, roads, markets, schools, astronomers, law courts and much else that also existed in his native Spain. Put another way, two cultural experiments had been running in parallel for 15,000 years, and when they came into contact, each recognized the other’s institutions.

It wasn’t just the civilizations of the Americas and Europe that resembled each other by that time. As biologist-turned-historian Peter Turchin observes in his tenth book, The Great Holocene Transformation, more than half of the world’s population in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries lived in five or six large societies with political systems that were remarkably structurally similar. His argument is that this was not a coincidence; although every society is unique, they have features in common that make them comparable.

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Manic Screaming

 We should make all spiritual talk
………….. Simple today:

God is trying to sell you something,
…… But you don’t want to buy.

….That is what your suffering is:

………Your fantastic haggling,
Your manic screaming over the price!

by Hafiz
rendered by Daniel Ladinsky
from I Heard God Laughing

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Sam Kriss at The Point:

On the 30th of March, 1981, John Hinckley brought us into the world we all live in today. He did it by firing a .22 “Devastator” round into the chest of the president of the United States.

At the time, people didn’t fully understand what had happened. Two hours after the shooting, there was a press conference in the White House briefing room. It was led by a junior official, since Press Secretary James Brady had a bullet lodged in his skull at the time. The questions were on conventional topics, like Ronald Reagan’s health, and the chain of command. The reporters wanted to know if the president was conscious. Had he been sedated? Who was with him in the hospital? While the bullet was being extracted from his chest, who was currently running the United States of America? Vice President George Bush was somewhere in Texas, apparently aware of the situation, but not in Washington yet. The deputy press secretary said he couldn’t answer that one. Moments later, he was yanked offstage, and Secretary of State Alexander Haig took over the podium. “As of now,” he told the media, “I am in control here in the White House.”

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Kapil Komireddi at The New Yorker:

By September 10th, Nepal had descended into a state of lawlessness, a country without a government or authority. The only national institution that survived—and that possessed the capability to restore order—was the Army, which, sheltering the civilian leadership, opened talks with representatives of the protest movement. Events then moved at dizzying speed. Within forty-eight hours, Nepal’s President had been forced to appoint an interim Prime Minister, dissolve the country’s elected Parliament, and announce new elections. As search teams set about recovering bodies from the charred government buildings, the death toll rose to more than seventy, and the number of injured exceeded two thousand.

Nepal is the third South Asian country in the past four years to stage a violent overthrow of its government. In 2022, anger over soaring prices in Sri Lanka erupted into mass protests that swept the Rajapaksa dynasty from power. Last August, the long reign of Sheikh Hasina, Bangladesh’s autocratic Prime Minister, was brought to a sudden end after bloody street rallies culminated in the sacking of her residence.

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Emily Eakin in the New York Times:

Nearly everyone struggled during the pandemic, but Justin Smith-Ruiu’s struggle took a particularly disturbing form. An American philosopher who teaches at the University of Paris, he was on a fellowship in New York in March 2020 when the city shut down, stranding him in a rental apartment in Brooklyn. He caught Covid the same month, and though he recovered from the virus, he sank into a deep, existential despair.

His job, his career milestones, even the homes, schools, hospitals and other institutions around which human social life revolved: All of it suddenly seemed flimsy and meaningless, like so much make-believe. “I had the sharp sense that the things that we take to be real just aren’t real,” he told me. “It was quite extreme.”

Smith-Ruiu, 53, could have sought counseling or joined the Great Resignation by quitting his job. Instead, he turned to drugs — first cannabis, then psilocybin (“magic mushrooms”) and, finally, muscimol, a psychedelic made from another mushroom, the fly agaric.

Yet his interest in mind-altering substances was as much professional as personal: His crisis of belief in the world around him was also, he concluded, a problem for his field.

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Alvin Powell in The Harvard Gazette:

Human history is rife with contentions about the purity (and superiority) of the bloodlines of one group over another and claims over ancestral homelands.

More than a decade of work on ancient human DNA has upended it all.

Instead, Harvard geneticist David Reich said on Monday, increasingly sophisticated analysis of genetic material made possible by technological advances shows that virtually everyone came from somewhere else, and everyone’s genetic background shows a mix from different waves of migration that washed over the globe.

“Ancient DNA is able to peer into the past and to understand how people are related to each other and to people living today,” Reich said during a talk at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. “And what it shows is worlds we hadn’t imagined before. It’s very surprising.”

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Samuel Hayim Brody in the Boston Review:

Mizrahi, a Hebrew word meaning “Eastern,” is used in the State of Israel to refer to Jews from Muslim-majority countries. Confusingly, it has widely come to replace the older term Sephardi, even though the latter traditionally means “Spanish” and has been used since medieval times to describe the Jews of the Iberian Peninsula, many of whom fled to the lands of the Ottoman Empire after their expulsion in 1492. It has never made much sense to describe the Jews of Iraq, for example—millennia-old communities with no connection to Spain or Portugal—as Sephardi. Nor does it make sense to describe Morocco as “east” of Germany. Instead, Mizrahi is an artifact of Israeli history, yoking together Jews with divergent histories in Tunisia, Yemen, and Iraq as they underwent similar experiences of immigration. But precisely because those experiences were so humiliating, the term has its opponents. In The Arab Jews: A Postcolonial Reading of Nationalism, Religion, and Ethnicity (2006), Yehouda Shenhav translates Mizrahi as “Oriental,” succinctly capturing the affects and attitudes that he and other opponents hear in it.

As an alternative, “Arab Jews” has a subversive quality.

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Connick et al in ABC News Australia:

Cancer is one of the most common causes of death in people, and case numbers are rising. At current rates, about one in two Australians can expect a cancer diagnosis by the age of 85. Vets, livestock farmers, pet owners and anyone who spends time around animals will also know that cancer can strike a whole range of creatures. But did you know it’s not just a disease in the animal kingdom?

Plants can get cancer too.

While cancer doesn’t affect plants like it does us, it can cause costly problems for horticultural and agricultural growers. All cancers begin when one cell or a few cells in an organism start growing uncontrollably. In humans and other animals, new healthy cells grow in an orderly and regulated way to replace damaged or dead cells. This keeps our organs and tissues functioning the way they should. But sometimes cells with mistakes in their genetic blueprint (or genome) don’t stop multiplying, and if they clump together, they form a tumour. Bits of that tumour can break away and spread via the bloodstream or lymphatic system to other parts of the body and form new tumours. This process is known as metastasis.

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Heman Chong at Cabinet Magazine:

The first door was in Tokyo, in the Roppongi district. He said he discovered it in a state of boredom, or more exactly, in that mental state that walking in Tokyo is particularly inclined to produce—a state of visual overstimulation that is like boredom, but also strangely close to a kind of hypersensitivity, a readiness to see a hidden order suddenly emerge in the dense life of the city. The door that captured his attention had been placed across a blind alleyway. It had no special features, but was remarkable for being unmarked, without a name, bell, or knocker. Oddly, the cracked cinderblocks that framed the door on either side seemed older than the buildings that they abutted. Behind the door were the branches of some trees, giving the entire scene the hint of a hortus conclusus, a walled garden in a neighborhood that was not known for being green. An electrical conduit snaked along the pavement and over the wall.

Heman Chong’s photograph of the door would become the first in his ongoing series documenting the back entrances of embassies and consulates—over three hundred of them since that first encounter in 2018.

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Afiya Zia in LSE:

The genealogy of blasphemy laws in Pakistan is not merely a story of legal prohibitions but of a shifting moral economy traversing colonial governance, post-colonial authoritarianism and contemporary populist religiosity. Introduced under British rule through Section 295 of the Indian Penal Code of 1860, these laws were designed to regulate communal sentiment and maintain order rather than serve as sacred doctrine. In post-colonial Pakistan, however, they have become sacralised.

General Zia-ul-Haq’s agenda of Islamisation, starting in 1979, transformed the colonial laws on blasphemy (known commonly as the ‘1927 Statutes’) into doctrinal absolutes, as ‘Hudud Ordinances’. Sections 295-B & 295-C criminalised defiling the Qur’an and insulting the Prophet, upgrading such acts into capital offences. What began as colonial order management mutated into a tool to empower clerics, suppress dissent and enforce Sunni orthodoxy.

Reliable data is scarce but the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) records that between 1987–2024 at least 2,793 individuals were accused under blasphemy provisions, with 70–80 per cent of cases in Punjab province. In 2024 alone, 344 new cases were registered — the highest annual figure. CSJ also documented 104 extra-judicial killings between 1994–2024, demonstrating the lethal consequences of law and vigilante action. While minorities remain vulnerable, statistical trends now show that intra-Muslim accusations have surpassed those against non-Muslims and constitute the largest share of those accused of blasphemy.

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