Mira Jacob in Harper’s Bazaar:
From her early documentary Indian Cabaret (1985), which follows strippers through Mumbai, to her first feature film, Salaam Bombay (1988), which centers the lives of street children, to Mississippi Masala (1991), which explores prejudice between Black and Indian communities in the U.S., to Queen of Katwe (2016), which gives a glimpse into the life of Ugandan chess prodigy Phiona Mutesi, Nair has built a career on surfacing brilliant, if often overlooked, stories. Her devotion to getting into the particularities and specificities of culture, for not being swayed by an invisible audience that executives insist might not get it, has earned her a loyal following. It’s also gotten her an Academy Award nomination and the Cannes Prix d’Or and Audience Award for Salaam Bombay, the Golden Lion award for Monsoon Wedding at the Venice Film Festival, and many other prizes. It is no surprise to any of us that a son raised in her household would engender the same loyalty.
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The names ‘dove’ and ‘pigeon’ can be deceptive. Scientifically speaking, neither of them carry much merit. All the birds we know as either pigeons or doves belong to the same family, Columbidae. This large group of often plump, slender-billed birds encompasses around 350 species, with five regularly found in the UK.
In 1907, US historian Henry Adams first started circulating a memoir that would go on to be a smash hit in 1919: The Education of Henry Adams. Given Adams’s illustrious family – both his grandfather and great-grandfather were presidents – you might expect it to be a self-congratulatory tale of the wonders of US education.
The development of better and more reliable artificial intelligence (AI) technologies has immense applications in the field of scientific research. AI has become a powerful extra set of eyes and hands for scientists: It can sift through heaps of data in seconds, guide experiments, and help write better manuscripts. “We’re seeing the emergence of subdisciplines that are AI plus X, where X is essentially every field of science. Neuroscience is no exception,” said 
Hal Hartley does have a new movie out. His first feature since Ned Rifle (2014), the conclusion of the Henry Fool trilogy. Did you know that? I suspect that either you did not know that or have known it for so long that you now suspect I am a poser. (That’s what shibboleth-speakers call people who have gained, but not earned, access to the shibboleth. Tedious, but it comes with the territory.) It’s called Where to Land, he paid for it via Kickstarter—as he has for his projects since Ned Rifle—and I doubt a large audience will see it. Hartley produces and sells his own box-sets and offers his movies via streaming on his 
Recently, I read “
The Christian case against pacifism is more convoluted, given the tension with the New Testament and early tradition. Yet in essence, it’s an appeal to common sense. While Jesus’s teachings may guide private life, this view holds, to apply them to public life is grossly irresponsible, since that would prevent Christians from defending the innocent or serving the state. After its legalization by Constantine in 313 CE, Christianity accepted a role in maintaining social order in the Roman Empire. Accordingly, bishops such as Ambrose and Augustine allowed Christians to participate in just wars and capital punishment. (They maintained the church’s ban on gladiatorial games, abortion and infanticide.) These churchmen didn’t deny Jesus’s teachings—they just made room for exceptions. To this end, they drew creatively on the Old Testament and philosophers like Cicero, or expanded on the apostle Paul’s dictum that government is ordained by God. Augustine, for example, reasoned that a soldier who slays on his superior’s orders doesn’t violate the prohibition on killing because he “does not himself ‘kill’—he is an instrument, a sword in its user’s hand.” Augustine thus offered Christians the kind of work-around that would enable them to punish and wage war with a good conscience.
In 2023, a mathematician named 
Machine learning using neural networks has led to a remarkable leap forward in artificial intelligence, and the technological and social ramifications have been discussed at great length. To understand the origin and nature of this progress, it is useful to dig at least a little bit into the mathematical and algorithmic structures underlying these techniques. Anil Ananthaswamy takes up this challenge in his book 
Cubans call it “el bloqueo” (the blockade). In the United States, we know it as “the embargo.” Technically speaking, US economic sanctions against Cuba comprise a set of laws in place since 1962 that prevent most avenues for trade between the two nations. However one refers to it, it is the longest trade embargo in modern history, and arguably one of the harshest. The measure was passed by President John F. Kennedy two years after the culmination of the Cuban Revolution, when armed insurgents toppled US-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista and ushered in an era of leftist radicalism and social transformation. Upon taking power in 1959, the insurgents’ leader, Fidel Castro, swiftly nationalized the land and assets of US nationals and companies across the island. Vastly underestimating the popularity of Castro and his movement, the US government responded with the sanctions and their 
In 2017, archaeologists digging in the middle of a Slovak wheat field uncovered four headless skeletons. The burials, in a ditch dug on the edge of a settlement more than 7000 years ago, belonged to one of Europe’s first farming communities. Burying people in or near settlements wasn’t unusual at the time—but burying them without heads was.
A new University of California San Diego 
When we think about advanced AI systems, we naturally draw on our experience with the only intelligent systems we’ve known: biological organisms, including humans. This shapes expectations that often remain unexamined—that genuinely intelligent systems will pursue their own goals, preserve themselves, act autonomously. We expect a “powerful AI” to act as a single, unified agent that exploits its environment. The patterns run deep: capable agents pursue goals, maintain themselves over time, compete for resources, preserve their existence. This is what intelligence looks like in our experience, because every intelligence we’ve encountered arose through biological evolution.