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A report by Forensic Architecture with the World Peace Foundation:

This report focuses on an Israeli system of aid distribution that ostensibly feeds Palestinians in Gaza, while in fact, according to our analysis, constituting a programme of intentional mass starvation on two levels: first, the starvation of individuals through the provision of starvation rations or no rations at all, and second, the use of mass starvation as a means of destroying the social order among the population of Gaza as a whole, towards the dismantling of the foundations of a functioning society in the region, and the separation of that population from its land.

Our findings show how Israel has systematically dismantled the long-standing and effective ‘civilian model’ of aid distribution through aid organisations and the local community. In its place, Israel has established a ‘military model’ of aid distribution which carries out starvation rationing. Through the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) and airdropped aid, Israel has created dependency upon a system which is, we conclude, deadly by design.

More here.  And see this, also by Forensic Architecture.

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Charles T. Rubin at the New Atlantis:

In fact, it is Gibson’s critique of what he calls the “modern program” that accounts for his belief that cities will persist under circumstances seemingly so unfavorable to their existence. By his account, a failing of the modern program is that it puts too much emphasis on the material conditions of urban life, and pays insufficient attention to its ethical dimension — how a city supports or undermines what people think of as a good life. The great modern city, Gibson understands, has no unified vision of the good, but becomes what it is by being an arena in which many such visions can interact. This situation creates dangers, most obviously the potential for conflict. But it also creates opportunities for accommodating diversity, adaptation, a certain kind of freedom, and even the adoption of ways of life that stand in a countercultural relationship to modernity. Each of these in turn presents its own set of dangers and opportunities. This complex way of life, Gibson seems to be saying, is what the modern city is, and what cities of the future could remain.

Like all science fiction authors, Gibson is an imperfect prognosticator. What we call cyberspace today has little resemblance to what he envisioned. After some forty years of anticipation, hackers still do not “jack into” cyberspace through a direct brain–machine interface. And we remain only on the verge of the various grand apocalypses that frame his stories. But we should not judge a science fiction author merely by how many of his or her inventions have come true.

more here.

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Katharine Harvey at Aeon Magazine:

In the popular imagination, the history of sex is a straightforward one. For centuries, the people of the Christian West lived in a state of sexual repression, straitjacketed by an overwhelming fear of sin, combined with a complete lack of knowledge about their own bodies. Those who fell short of the high moral standards that church, state and society demanded of them faced ostracism and punishment. Then in the mid-20th century things changed forever when, in Philip Larkin’s oft-quoted words, ‘Sexual intercourse began in 1963 … between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles’ first LP.’

In reality, the history of human sexuality is far more interesting and wild. Many prevailing presumptions about the sex lives of our medieval ancestors are rooted in the erroneous belief that they lived in an unsophisticated age of religious fanaticism and medical ignorance. While Christian ideals indeed influenced medieval attitudes to sex, they were rather more complex than contemporary prejudices suggest. Christian beliefs interacted with medieval medical theories to help shape some surprising and sophisticated ideas about sex, and a wide variety of different sexual practices, long before the sexual revolution.

more here.

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Katherine Ellison in Knowable Magazine:

The statistics are staggering — and so is the toll on society. Throughout the world, roughly 27 percent of women ages 15 to 49 experience violence by intimate male partners at least once during their lifetimes. The scourge costs society trillions of dollars and seriously harms children’s mental health.

“Each case of violence in a woman’s life is a tragedy for herself and for those around her, affecting not only the woman and her health and well-being, but also her family and community,” write two public health researchers in the 2024 Annual Review of Public Health. In their article, Susan B. Sorenson of the University of Pennsylvania and Heidi Stöckl of the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich detail the scope of this urgent public health issue and how it might be more vigorously addressed.

More here.

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Sara Reardon in Science:

The small plastic chip etched with channels is a synthetic human organ—and one vision of future drug safety testing. Inside, layers of human liver, epithelial, and immune cells line the tiny conduits, which feed them with bloodlike fluid and remove waste. The chip, made by the Boston-based biotech company Emulate Inc., could one day help researchers and pharmaceutical companies screen out candidate drugs that cause a condition known as drug-induced liver injury (DILI)—one of several types of liver toxicity that together scuttle 22% of all clinical trials.

DILI often doesn’t show up when drugs are tested in animals. But in a recent study, Emulate’s chip was 87% accurate in identifying compounds known to cause DILI—and 100% accurate in flagging those that don’t. The chip is now undergoing further testing as part of a new U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) pilot program to evaluate alternatives to animal testing. If it performs well, drug developers will be able to use data it generates to show a new drug is likely safe before they apply to begin human trials.

More here.

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My Father as Weather

Each morning he rises
out of the scrub grass,

half-thought, half-threat.
The grass doesn’t scream,

just splits its dry mouth to cradle him.
I watch from the bluff

where the sky folds white into a tired napkin.
His whole shape borrows

from wind and sand.
No coat, no wallet,

no time creased
into the pocket of apology.

Just the sea of drift releasing him
molecule by molecule.

I move closer.
I stand where the grass parts

like scribbled sutures,
let his wind-bone shoulder drag

through the part of me
that can’t quit

still asking what I did
wrong by being born.

A field never mourns
what weather carries off.

Even when the sky cuts
his outline like scissors

I outlive. I stay—
salt-numbed & radiant.

What he abandoned,
I gathered:

scrap wind, a dead name,
the luminous debris of his daughter.

by Chrissy Stegman
from Ekphrastic Challenge
Rattle Magazine, July2025

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Hamilton Cain in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

We’ve all heard (some among us have preached) well-meaning sermons about the importance of amplifying marginalized voices in literary spaces. Yet despite good intentions—e.g., tropes of the “perceptive outsider” or “staunch individualist”—there remains a dearth of more fully rendered neurodiverse characters. One of our finest contemporary writers, Gary Shteyngart, is here to remedy that problem. Meet Vera Bradford-Shmulkin, the plucky, if often melancholy, 10-year-old protagonist of Shteyngart’s enchanting new novel, Vera, or Faith. An academic overachiever obsessed with language and a future career as “a woman in STEM,” Vera feels alienated from her classmates at her Manhattan magnet elementary. She struggles to calm her “monkey brain” and control her toe-walking and arm flaps, signature behaviors of mild autism, or what we used to categorize as Asperger’s syndrome. Shteyngart portrays these with compassion; his focus is on the potential of the “outsider” as a gifted truth-teller. Far from a subject of pity, Vera is a wise and feeling guide—like a 10-year-old Virgil, shepherding us through the novel’s netherworld of tormented souls while contending with her own angsts.

More here.

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Philip Ball in The Guardian:

Ecologist Mark Vellend’s thesis is that to understand the world, “physics and evolution are the only two things you need”. Evolution, here, refers in the most general sense to outcomes that depend on what has gone before. Thus the world can be divided into things that are inescapable and things that are contingent, depending on circumstances. In the terminology he borrows from evolutionary biologist Graham Bell, the study of physical necessity is the “first science”; that of historical contingency the second. So, the periodic table of 90 or so natural elements, which are inescapable given the laws of physics, would fall under the first science. Dung beetles and vice presidents, which aren’t, fall under the second.

This “second science”, Vellend argues, unites disciplines from evolutionary biology to anthropology, history, economics and political science. If we fail to teach children about evolutionary processes, we “deprive them of understanding the fundamental set of processes that underlie not only life, but also the cultures and economies (and education systems) in which they live and work”. In developing this thesis, Everything Evolves draws on examples from technology and product design, microbiology, ecology, linguistics, and more.

More here.

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Tomas Pueyo at Uncharted Territories:

Because of climate, the North farmed crops like wheat and barley that required very little work, and that work was easy to automate. This tended to make farmers independent, incentivize industrialization for the machinery, and push settlers west very fast, as they weren’t as limited by labor needs.

Conversely, the crops grown in the south—mainly cotton, tobacco, sugarcane, and rice—all require substantially more work, so getting lots of workers at the lowest possible cost made or broke fortunes. This is why slavery emerged here, why it was fundamental to the South’s economy, and why Southerners went to war to continue it.

Why does all this matter? It’s not just a crucial fact of US history. This has dramatic consequences today, from the roots of racial inequality, to where the Democratic party wins elections, and the relative poverty of the US South.

So let’s dive in: How exactly did climate cause the Civil War, and what are the consequences of that today?

More here.

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First Light

after the Webb discovery
The newest moon they found around Uranus
is so small it fits inside
a sentence.

Ten kilometers across,
they think. A shimmer
between Ophelia and Bianca—

it doesn’t even pull at things.
Still, it’s there—
threaded on the same old dark.

I read this the same week
Mickey died. She was only ours
eleven months—not long enough

to unlearn flinching. She’d still sleep
under the table, even after
we moved the table.

They say the moon was always there,
just invisible. Too soft
for Voyager. Too faint for Hubble.

How many things love us
quietly? How many
never get seen

until a better eye looks?
The article showed no images—
only a plot of starlight interrupted

like breath paused
in grief. And a line drawn
where the absence
spoke.

I don’t think I believe
in heaven, but still I like
that the cold knows how

to hold a secret for a long time
without
breaking it.

by Sushanta Basumatary

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Andrew Stuttaford at The New Criterion:

Kaputt is episodic, its style dreamlike, surreal, hallucinatory, grotesque, a vision of a world so askew that even the skies have gone mad: “the sky was an eyeless face—a dead white face.” The carcasses of horses remain trapped in a frozen lake, “a vast sheet of white marble . . . . Only the heads stuck out of the crust of ice.” Frank playing Chopin in his castle, “Malaparte” wandering through the Romanian city of Jassy (Iași), just ahead of a pogrom: “It began to rain, a slow warm rain that seemed to drop out of a cut vein.” Occasionally he escapes to high society—Princess This, Count That—adding some Proust to a work that owes much more to Goya.

In Kaputt, Malaparte the novelist uses the credibility, such as it was, of Malaparte the journalist, leaving it up to the reader to decide how much is fact, heavily embellished fact, or entirely made up, an ambiguity not unhelpful for an author rewriting his own past. And by the time of Kaputt’s publication, this is what Malaparte was trying to do. His association with Italy’s Fascist regime had been complicated, but it was close enough to merit a (brief) jailing after Mussolini had been overthrown, and the promise of dangerous questions to come.

more here.

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Dmitri Levitin at Literary Review:

Historians of science have a guilty secret: we don’t particularly enjoy writing about those deemed singular geniuses. The public – or at least publishers – want stories of revolutionaries who stood entirely apart from their peers and predecessors, or, failing that, to see them ‘exposed’ as plagiarists (ideally stealing the work of the oppressed). But science rarely works in such simplistic ways. A century of historical scholarship has shown that the figure of the lone genius is largely mythical. 

Still, it remains tempting to think that Albert Einstein is the exception to the rule. Everything about him savours of the preternatural: his discovery, aged just twenty-six, of special relativity while working as a clerk at the Swiss Patent Office; his appearance in later life as a wild-haired guru uttering sage pronouncements about the universe; the sheer weirdness of the general theory of relativity and quantum physics. Diana Buchwald and Michael Gordin’s marvellous and concise new biography shows that for all his unquestionable brilliance, Einstein almost always worked as part of a broader community rather than delivering vatic pronouncements from on high.

more here.

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Alla Katsnelson in Nature:

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Samuel Jay Keyser at The MIT Press Reader:

Made at the high point of Kline, de Kooning, and Pollock, Andy Warhol’s “Campbell’s Soup Cans” was a poke in the eye of abstract expressionism. Not only was it blatantly mimetic, but it was being blatantly mimetic with a mundane commercial product found in every supermarket and corner grocery store in America. When people think of repetition in painting, they probably think first of these iconic soup cans.

But not all repetition is as in-your-face or as disruptive as “Campbell’s Soup Cans.” One painting from the Impressionist period is particularly pertinent. I am thinking of “Paris Street; Rainy Day” by Gustave Caillebotte. Currently housed in the Art Institute of Chicago, it was originally exhibited at the Third Impressionist Exhibition in Paris in 1877. It is probably Caillebotte’s best-known work. I consider it a masterpiece and regret that I have never seen the real thing. Even so, it never ceases to bowl me over. Discussions of it typically focus on the incredible verisimilitude of the painting, the sense that it is photographic in its vivid capture of an ordinary moment.

More here.

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Eric Drexler at AI Prospects: Toward Global Goal Alignment:

Automating routine tasks expands possibilities. Before automatic differentiation, deep learning practitioners derived and implemented gradients by hand for each model family, a laborious and error-prone process. When Theano and its successors automated this mathematical labor, they transformed neural networks from a specialized practice into a broadly accessible discipline. This unlock, combined with massive datasets and GPU computing, catalyzed the deep learning revolution.

Today, we’re seeing a confluence of similar advances happening simultaneously across the ML stack. This isn’t the “recursive self-improvement” of AGI mythology, where a monolithic entity modifies itself toward superintelligence. It’s a systemic process in which specialized tools automate routine tasks while making new tasks tractable. Researchers increasingly orchestrate these tools to build automated workflows.

Today’s trajectory is toward orchestrating systems that integrate piecemeal-superhuman capabilities of increasing scope. Looking forward, the comprehensive automation of research tasks has become a question of timelines, not outcomes. What we’re witnessing now are the early stages, and in this domain, automation accelerates automation.

More here.

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