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Hannah Ritchie at Sustainability by numbers:

My argument is simple: for the first time in history, we can improve human wellbeing while reducing our environmental impact.

It’s common to think that sustainability — or, rather, our lack of sustainability — is a new problem. For most of human history, our ancestors lived sustainably, and only recently has that been knocked off-balance.

Coming from an environmental background, I would have said the same. Look at any series of graphs on environmental pressure, and it’s not hard to see why people would frame it as a new problem. Plot global curves of carbon dioxide emissions, land use, air pollution, global temperatures, or fertiliser use, and they all rise sharply in the last century. It creates the impression that things were fine, but now they’re really not. It’s these curves that often make people — especially young people — feel fatalistic about the future. I was certainly one of them.

By this definition of environmental pressure, it is true that the world has become much less sustainable in modern history. But that only captures half of the story.

More here.

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So Be It. Amen.

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Victoria Craw in The Washington Post:

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Sheon Han at Asterisk:

The long tradition of carceral creativity goes back centuries: John Bunyan wrote The Pilgrim’s Progress, Boethius The Consolation of Philosophy, and Oscar Wilde De Profundis all while behind bars. The lineage continued into modern times with Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man, Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, and, of course, Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o wrote an entire novel on toilet paper in his prison cell.

Confinement in the military, it turns out, can also be a boon to literary output. James Salter packed a typewriter to write between flight missions, and Ludwig Wittgenstein drafted the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in the trenches of World War I.

Because I’m no genius, writing philosophical treatises would be a tall order. But I figured I could at least read them. The bleak summer before enlistment felt less grim when I realized I could make it a reading retreat. Twenty-one months of service were ninety-one weeks — in my economy, six academic semesters, or three years of college.

More here.

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Sarah Kuta in Smithsonian Magazine:

For the study, scientists combined nine previously collected datasets to look at the brain scans of almost 4,000 “neurotypical” individuals, from newborns to 90-year-olds. Specifically, they looked at diffusion MRI scans, which measure the microscopic movements of water molecules inside the brain. These scans show how the organ’s tissues are structured and can also be used to detect subtle changes, allowing the researchers to see how average brain architecture evolves over a lifetime.

The scientists measured brain wiring changes using 12 different metrics, including the efficiency of connections between regions and the extent of compartmentalization. This analysis revealed the five epochs, each with its own pattern of brain architecture trends.

The first phase occurs from birth to age 9, during which connections between different regions of the brain are relatively inefficient. During this period, the brain also begins consolidating and pruning those connections.

The second era takes place from ages 9 to 32.

More here.

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Nathan Gardels at Noema:

In Jim Fishkin’s new book, “Can Deliberation Cure The Ills of Democracy?,” the pioneering practitioner of deliberative polling surveys the whole array of such practices from citizens’ assemblies to policy juries and independent citizen reviews of ballot measures that are taking place from Brazil to Europe to the U.S. state of Oregon.

The aim in each endeavor is to convene a gathering of citizens that is indicative of the body politic as a whole to consider issues outside the fever of the electoral arena. In those nonpartisan “islands of goodwill,” knowledgeable experts provide verified information. Pro and con positions are presented, as in a jury trial. On that informed basis, citizens deliberate choices and seek consensus to guide policymakers. Fishkin’s experience over 30 years consistently demonstrates how the polarization sparked by the partisan rancor of electoral competition dissipates and how common ground is found through structured deliberation.

The limitation of most of these efforts is that they are advisory and not binding on the powers that be. In recent years, that is beginning to change as citizen-driven deliberative practices are being integrated into political systems through institutions that foster “government with the people,” which directly impacts policy choices.

More here.

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David Vichnar at 3:AM Magazine:

Writing à propos of Louis Armand’s recent opus magnum, A Tomb in H-Section (2025), critic Ramiro Sanchiz called it “a necromodernist tour de force which animates every remain of (un)dead XXth century literature,” thus invoking the spectre of necromodernism, a modernism long-buried but still somehow living on, its undead corpse back again for yet another zombie standoff. In a similar vein, the publisher note described the tome as “a vast, complex book object that concentrates the synergies of Louis Armand’s Golemgrad Pentalogy, of which it is at once a crowning achievement and a jocoserious deconstruction — an ‘Armandgeddon,’ if you will.”

Common to both assessments of Armand’s writing — to reverse a well-known Lyotard maxim regarding postmodernism — is a notion of a type of modernism in its posthumous state, a necromodernist condition in which writing persists in the ruins of literature’s once-modern ambitions. Necromodernism neither celebrates the new nor nostalgically mourns the old, inhabiting instead a space where cultural memory, media saturation, and infrastructural collapse converge into textual practice. It is neither an elegy for modernism nor a prophecy of what comes next, but rather a practice of endurance.

more here.

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Harriet A. Washington at The American Scholar:

“Let Paul Robeson singing Water Boy and Rudolph Fisher writing about the streets of Harlem … cause the smug Negro middle class to turn from their white, respectable, ordinary books and papers to catch a glimmer of their own beauty.” So wrote Langston Hughes in his landmark 1926 essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.” Today, Paul Robeson—singer, actor, athlete, lawyer, antiracism icon—needs no introduction. But who was Rudolph Fisher?

You would not have had to ask in 1926. Rudolph John Chauncey Fisher was one of the brightest figures of the Harlem Renaissance. Hughes described him as the “wittiest of these New Negroes of Harlem whose tongue was flavored with the sharpest and saltiest humor. … [He] always frightened me a little, because he could think of the most incisively clever things to say—and I could never think of anything to answer.” Although his star has been eclipsed by Zora Neale Hurston, W. E. B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, and Hughes himself, Fisher once blazed at the center of this pantheon as a masterly author of short fiction and novels; as a polymath who excelled in science, music, and oratory; and as a physician.

more here.

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The Soil Must be Fed

The writer can only be fertile if he renews himself
and he can only renew himself if his soul is
constantly enriched by fresh experience.

There is no more fruitful source of this than
the enchanting exploration of the great
literatures of the past. For the production
of a work of art is not the result of a miracle.
It needs preparation.

The soil, be it ever so rich, must be fed.

By taking thought, by deliberate effort,
the artist must enlarge, deepen and diversify
his personality. Then the soil must lie fallow.

Like the bride of Christ, the artist waits for the
illumination that shall bring forth a new spiritual life.
He goes about his ordinary avocations with patience.
the subconscious does its mysterious business; and then,
suddenly springing, you might think from nowhere,
the idea is produced.

But like the corn that was sown on stony ground
it may easily wither away; it must be tended
with anxious care.

All the power of the artist’s mind must be set
to work on it, all his technical skill, all his experience,
and whatever he has in him of character and
individuality, so that with infinite pains he may
present it with the completeness that is fitting to it.

by W. Somerset Maugham, A Writer’s Notebook

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Christian Wimer in Harper’s Magazine:

A 1980 case study from England depicts a young man with an IQ of 126, excellent performance in his university classes, normal social skills, and basically no brain. Trees can anticipate, cooperate, and remember, in the ordinary sense of those terms. Albert Einstein credited all his major discoveries to music. Some people revived from apparent death report confirmable details they could not possibly have observed, at times far from their bodies. Cut a flatworm’s head off and it will not only regrow a new one but remember things only the lopped-off head had learned. The term “species” is increasingly meaningless. Ninety-five percent of physicists who won the Nobel Prize in the twentieth century believed in a god. A group of hotel cleaning staff showed significant improvements in blood pressure, weight, and body mass index after being told their work counted as exercise, though their levels of activity were unchanged. Until the Eighties, it was common practice in the United States to operate on infants without anesthesia, as it was believed their brains were not formed enough to feel pain. The human brain is the most complicated thing we know of in the universe, and the development of AI will have no bearing on this. The writer Fanny Howe died on July 8, 2025, at the age of eighty-four. Form is prior to matter. The first place was a voice. There is no such thing as stillness.

More here.

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Sven Beckert at Literary Hub:

We live in a world created by capitalism. The ceaseless accumulation of capital forges the cities we inhabit, determines the way we work, allows an extraordinarily large number of people to engage in unprecedented levels of consumption, influences our politics, and shapes the landscapes around us. It is impossible to look at Earth and miss the world‑historical force of capitalism.

This is true as much for the greatest structures we inhabit as for the most intimate parts of our lives, as much for the world’s geology as for the ways we think about ourselves. To start, we acquire almost all goods and services we consume through markets, something that would have been unimaginable for most of human history. We sell our labor through markets—again, unimaginable for most of human history. Some of us might trade in stocks, either as a full‑time vocation or to safeguard something called retirement; most people at most times would have considered this trading deeply sacrilegious, more like sorcery than a legitimate way to gain wealth.

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Leila Sloman in Quanta:

In mathematics, ubiquitous objects called groups display nearly magical powers. Though they’re defined by just a few rules, groups help illuminate an astonishing range of mysteries. They can tell you which polynomial equations are solvable, for instance, or how atoms are arranged in a crystal.

And yet, among all the different kinds of groups, one type stands out. Identified in the early 1870s, Lie groups (pronounced “Lee”) are crucial to some of the most fundamental theories in physics, and they’ve made lasting contributions to number theory and chemistry. The key to their success is the way they blend group theory, geometry and linear algebra.

In general, a group is a set of elements paired with an operation (like addition or multiplication) that combines two of those elements to produce a third. Often, you can think of a group as the symmetries of a shape — the transformations that leave the shape unchanged.

More here.

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Sophie McBain in The Guardian:

Most people could tell you that Francis Crick, together with James Watson, discovered the double helix structure of DNA, and shaped our understanding of how genes work. Fewer know that Crick also played a key role in modern neuroscience and inspired our continuing efforts to understand the biological basis of consciousness.

Crick once said the two questions that interested him most were “the borderline between the living and the non-living, and the workings of the brain”, questions that were usually discussed in religious or mystical terms but that he believed could be answered by science. In his new biography of the Nobel prize-winning scientist, Matthew Cobb, emeritus professor of zoology at the University of Manchester, does an admirable job of capturing the rare thinker who not only set himself such ambitious goals but made remarkable progress in achieving them, radically remaking two scientific disciplines in the process.

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Zack Savitsky in Science Magazine:

Standing in a garden on the remote German island of Helgoland one day in June, two theoretical physicists quibble over who—or what—constructs reality. Carlo Rovelli, based at Aix-Marseille University, insists he is real with respect to a stone on the ground. He may cast a shadow on the stone, for instance, projecting his existence onto their relationship. Chris Fuchs of the University of Massachusetts Boston retorts that it’s preposterous to imagine the stone possessing any worldview, seeing as it is a stone. Although allied in their belief that reality is subjective rather than absolute, they both leave the impromptu debate unsatisfied, disagreeing about whether they agree.

Such is the state of theoretical quantum mechanics, scientists’ deepest description of the atomic world. The theory was developed 100 years ago on Helgoland, where a 23-year-old Werner Heisenberg retreated to escape a bout of hay fever—and to reimagine what an atom looks like.

More here.

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