The Sarin shortcut: How AI lowers the bar for chemical weapons

Ashutosh Jogalekar at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists:

For those contemplating mass casualties, biotoxins like ricin are easy to produce. But delivering them effectively is difficult, requiring specialized techniques like aerosolization. Conversely for chemical warfare agents like sarin, synthesis (because of restricted precursors) has traditionally been the hard part, even if delivering them does not require specialized methods.

However, that balance is tipping because of advances in artificial intelligence. Generative AI and off-the-shelf computational tools are collapsing the precursor barrier, making DIY sarin analogs (compounds that resemble the molecular structure of sarin) as attractive as castor-bean mash for rogue individuals. These applications can make the synthesis and use of nerve agents for nefarious purposes marginally but consequentially more probable.

More here.

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How To Fix DEI

Rachel Kleinfeld at Persuasion:

Recent assaults on DEI from the right have caused people who care about a diverse, inclusive America to circle the wagons against attacks from people who, at best, want to pretend the country is already colorblind, and at worst, want a return to an era when White, Christian men presided unquestioned at the top of the status hierarchy. But proponents of diversity do need to alter these programs—not to please those who want to go backward, but to help America become the inclusive nation it needs to be moving forward.

If America is to remain a democracy, demographic reality means that its politics and culture must become ever more inclusive. According to U.S. census data, in 1860 Whites comprised 86% of the population. A century later, the number had gone up slightly to 89%. And then it began to fall, fast. By 2023, only 62 percent of Americans identified as solely White.

More here.

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Creature of the Late Afternoon

E. Tammy Kim at n+1:

There’s a movement, or voguish tendency, in South Korea called 4B, which emerged online as part of a #MeToo-style feminist resurgence in 2016. It pushed a four-pronged refusal of marriage, reproduction, dating, and sex. (The B is for 비 bhee, meaning un- or anti-.) When a right-wing prosecutor named Yoon Suk Yeol rallied men’s-rights voters to win the nation’s presidency in 2022, the feminist wave seemed decidedly over. But Trump’s reelection two years later provoked an American interest in 4B. According to some viral TikToks and newspaper articles, American women were disavowing heterosexual habits. The dust of 4B in Korea swirled temporarily back to life. 

I was in Seoul with my parents when I noticed the Korean social media posts quoting US social media posts celebrating dated Korean social media posts. My editor asked me to write a short piece about 4B, which I started to outline at the dining table of our rental in the Itaewon neighborhood, near the decommissioned US military base.

more here.

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Reality Is Evil

Drew M Dalton at Aeon Magazine:

Consider Friedrich Nietzsche, one of the first thinkers of the 19th century who saw the emerging thermodynamic revolution as a pathway to a new vision of the cosmos. What he saw was neither good nor evil, but simply a ‘monster of energy, without beginning, without end; a firm, iron magnitude of force that does not grow bigger or smaller, that does not expend itself but only transforms.’ However, Nietzsche seems to have overlooked the second and third laws of thermodynamics, which complicates (or nullifies) his optimism in the infinite creative potency of reality. The same could not be said for his contemporary Philipp Mainländer, who drew upon all three of the laws of thermodynamics to establish a metaphysical foundation for a new pessimistic philosophy. In the inevitable decay and destruction, Mainländer saw a new basis for the moral resignation and quietism dominating German intellectual circles at the time.

In the 20th century, thinkers like Isabelle Stengers and Bernard Stiegler have drawn upon the insights of the thermodynamic revolution to argue for what the former sees as the fundamental indeterminacy of reality and what the latter argues is the driving force of social and political developments since the Industrial Revolution.

more here.

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Aggressive Breast Cancers Steal Energy from Nearby Fat Cells

Shelby Bradford in TheScientist:

Patients with triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) have more aggressive, invasive tumors and fewer treatment options than other kinds of breast cancers. TNBC tumors use fatty acid oxidation as a key part of their metabolism.1 Coupled with studies that showed people with higher body mass indexes are more likely to develop TNBC, researchers suspected that adipose tissue influenced tumor growth.2 However, the mechanism underlying this relationship was unclear.

In a study published in Nature CommunicationsAndrei Goga, a cancer biologist at the University of California, San Francisco, and his team showed that TNBC cells form bridges to nearby fat cells and activate lipolysis in adipocytes to release fatty acids.3 The researchers showed that blocking this process halted tumor growth in mice. “This is a golden opportunity for us to develop effective strategies to treat the most aggressive forms of breast cancer,” Goga said in a press release.

More here.

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How a self-taught biologist transformed nature writing — and inspired Darwin

Gareth Thompson in Nature:

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Sunday, August 24, 2025

Creatures Apart

Vivian Gornick on Shulamith Firestone’s portraits of madness, in Boston Review:

When I was a girl in the 1950s women, for the most part, got married, gave birth, and stayed home; if necessary, they went to work as schoolteachers or secretaries or salesgirls. They did not enter the professions, start a business, serve in government, or become university professors; nor did they climb a telephone pole, go down in the mines, or compete in a marathon. Today a girl is born with the knowledge that not only can she do any or all of the above, it is even assumed that she will pursue a working life as well as a domestic one. The change in social expectations for women, nothing short of monumental, is due to the Second Wave of American feminism (otherwise known as the Women’s Liberation Movement), a political and social development characterized by the twin efforts of liberals who worked throughout the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s to achieve equality for women under the law and radicals who worked to eradicate deep-dyed, historic sexism through a change in cultural consciousness. Among the leading figures in this second group was Shulamith Firestone, of whom it was said, “I think of her as a shooting star. She flashed brightly across the midnight sky, and then she disappeared.” That’s exactly how I remember her.

More here.

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Violence and (de)development: From Gaza to “fragile and conflict-affected situations”

Adam Tooze in Chartbook:

Starting with Gaza and asking where else people starve and fight for their lives is an urgent and productive task. I wrote about the question a few weeks ago. I am prompted to return to it by a new publication by a team at the World Bank.

Right now, I find it impossible to think about violence and (de)development without forming this loop: Gaza-Israel-development-(de)development. The World Bank report includes West Bank and Gaza in its data set of “fragile and conflict-affected situations”, but the list extends to the entire world.

As I argued in the previous post: Gaza is an extreme case because it involves a rich and powerful state victimizing a tightly controlled and largely defenseless population under a state of siege with the explicit intent of ethnic cleansing in conjunction with an ongoing settler-colonial project. Writing in the 1940s Raphael Lemkin struggled to find categories to describe just such a case in Nazi occupied Poland. The neologism he coined was genocide.

More here.

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Sari Nusseibeh on Philosophy and Conflict

In Philosophy Bites, David Edmonds and Nigel Warburton interview Sari Nusseibeh:

Host 1: We’re talking today about philosophy and conflict. But before we get into that, perhaps you can tell us a bit about your early years because you’re born into a a very famous and distinguished Palestinian family.

Guest: Yes. I was born into a family that considers itself to be distinguished. Our family name, Nasebeh, comes from the very, very distant past. It’s the name of a woman who supposedly fought alongside the prophet Muhammad. And in theory, we actually came to Jerusalem right from that time.

Guest: I was born personally in Damascus. That was during the early wars that created Israel and created, on the other hand, the Palestinian refugee problem. My parents’ mother was in Damascus. I was born there. But a year or two later after my birth, I came to Jerusalem and grew up in Jerusalem.

Host 1: And then you went to Oxford as an undergraduate at a time when Wittgenstein and linguistic philosophy more generally was dominant. Ordinary language in particular, the idea that philosophical problems as it were dissolve in the analysis of language, that’s very much gone out of fashion. But I wonder whether its influence has stayed with you, what the importance of your Oxford philosophy was.

Guest: Well, I think the primary importance has to do not with the theory of linguistics or the theory of philosophy of language as such, but with the way philosophy tutors are conducted. And in my case, I was very lucky to have as a tutor Oscar Wood. Although he did not necessarily like me, I was quite fond of him, and he has remained with me ever since. He was the kind of person who made you always search for good reasons for holding the view that you hold or the opinion that you hold. And this has stayed with me.

More here.

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Shulamith Firestone’s portraits of madness reveal a condition afflicting us all

Vivian Gornick in Boston Reviews:

When I was a girl in the 1950s women, for the most part, got married, gave birth, and stayed home; if necessary, they went to work as schoolteachers or secretaries or salesgirls. They did not enter the professions, start a business, serve in government, or become university professors; nor did they climb a telephone pole, go down in the mines, or compete in a marathon. Today a girl is born with the knowledge that not only can she do any or all of the above, it is even assumed that she will pursue a working life as well as a domestic one. The change in social expectations for women, nothing short of monumental, is due to the Second Wave of American feminism (otherwise known as the Women’s Liberation Movement), a political and social development characterized by the twin efforts of liberals who worked throughout the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s to achieve equality for women under the law and radicals who worked to eradicate deep-dyed, historic sexism through a change in cultural consciousness. Among the leading figures in this second group was Shulamith Firestone, of whom it was said, “I think of her as a shooting star. She flashed brightly across the midnight sky, and then she disappeared.” That’s exactly how I remember her.

Although I, too, was a Second Wave feminist, I functioned in the Movement more as a writer than a group-oriented activist. In fact, I first met Shulamith when I interviewed her for my first feminist piece for the Village Voice. I can still see her that day in 1969, sitting in the kitchen of her fourth-floor Lower East Side walk-up—small, fierce, large dark eyes peering out at me from the middle of that extraordinary mane of waist-length black hair—answering my every question with the rapid-fire rhetorical skill that marked her every utterance. It was no surprise to me when, the following year, her first book, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution was published and I, along with the rest of the world, felt the full force of her Talmudic brilliance.

More here.

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Don’t like joining in? Why it could be your superpower

Rami Kaminski in The Guardian:

‘I can’t explain it. He is a sweetheart. A beautiful boy inside and out, and so brilliant.” This was how a session with N, a longtime patient of mine, began some years ago. Her son, A, was a young teenager, and in spite of coming from a warm, loving family with attentive parents, he had started having social  difficulties.

He wasn’t being bullied or left out at school. He wasn’t depressed, moody or anxious. In fact, he was popular, well liked and constantly being invited to parties, to basketball games, and to hang out with groups of young people. The problem was, he turned all these invitations down, and N couldn’t understand why. Three weeks later, I sat with A in my office. I asked him to describe his experience of attending parties and other social events. “I just feel weird,” he said, “like I’m not part of it, which is odd as these are all my friends. I know they like me and are happy I’m there, but I still don’t feel connected. I only feel lonely or bored when I’m with many people, and not when I’m with one or two close friends or when I’m alone.” Then he added: “I don’t like to say those things because it makes me sound like an alien. Do you think there’s something wrong with me?”

More here.

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Sunday Poem

They/Them

said short: i feel more like a stud. said
with some nuance: as if i came to
masculinity through the women’s gate,
as if a daughter who grew into her father
but not like trans, but like trans or
a transformation without catalyst
or smoke. or more like born
in the right body too early or born
at the wrong time, in the wrong language.
i remember Tommy said he (is he a they now?)
lived for how i put it in that one poem “more
tomboy than boy” and i think that’s what
language does—builds a room made for living.
and who have i followed further into myself?
Cam, Paula, Tommy, Fati, Andrea, Auntie George
or anyone who saved me from a body of silence
by just living their lives in the sun? and if
the soul is a table on which the body sits
crowded with the meat and the marrow
and the red, red wine, around me sit
too many ghosts to ever rest in isolation.
of course you should address me in the plural.
said short: i am everyone. i am everything.

said shorter: i am.

By Danez Smith

from Poetry (July/August 2025)

 

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Friday, August 22, 2025

A new book makes the case for replacing elections with a system of government based on random selection

Niko Kolodny in the Boston Review:

When democracy seems everywhere in crisis, it may sound paradoxical, to say the least, that the solution to our troubles is to scrap elections altogether. But that is precisely what political philosopher Alexander Guerrero proposes in his bold and illuminating book, Lottocracy: Democracy Without Elections. We should select political officials not by voting, he contends, but by lottery from among the entire adult citizenry.

As radical as it sounds, the idea, indeed the reality, of “sortition”—using random selection to select political officials—is nothing new. Nor is it the prerogative of any particular political persuasion. The Athenians used such a system more than two thousand years ago. The Trinidadian Marxist C. L. R. James celebrated this system when he argued, echoing Lenin, that “every cook can govern.” The idea has seen something of a popular revival in recent years thanks to the writing and advocacy of people like political theorist Hélène Landemore and Belgian historian David Van Reybrouck. And it has been put into practice in a variety of deliberative and citizens’ assemblies, including in Europe and the United States. What sets Guerrero’s analysis apart is that he has thought through how such a system might work in modern societies in exhaustive detail. The result is a landmark argument that must be reckoned with.

More here.

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What’s the carbon footprint of using ChatGPT or Gemini?

Hannah Ritchie at Sustainability by Numbers:

  • My main conclusion is no different from my initial post: individual usage of ChatGPT and other LLMs for most people is a small part of their carbon and energy footprint.
  • The energy use “per query” is possibly 10 times lower than estimated in the previous article. Google estimates that its median text query uses around 33-times less energy than 12 months ago. So, this kind of stacks up.
  • Google says that its median text query uses around 0.24 Wh of electricity. That’s a tiny amount: equivalent to microwaving for one second, or running a fridge for 6 seconds.

More here.

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