Bill Drexel in The New Atlantis:

AI systems’ mastery of language may or may not portend a future of superintelligent AI minds, but it already provides a proof of concept for a revolution in gene editing. And though such a revolution promises to unlock transformative medical advancements, it also brings longstanding bioethical dilemmas to the fore: Should people of means be able to hardwire physical or cognitive advantages into their genomes, or their children’s? Where is the line between medical therapy and dehumanizing enhancements?

Just as AI precipitates these morally fraught capabilities, the geopolitical race for AI dominance is upending the historic monopoly that Western nations have had in shaping international bioethical norms. China’s remarkable progress in AI, along with its demonstrated willingness to experiment with genetically enhancing its population, raise the possibility that a totalitarian state with profoundly different ethical standards from our own will have at least equal say in determining the future of genetic engineering.

More here.

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Alex Clark in The Guardian:

What happens when an internationally bestselling historian, a Nobel peace prize-winning journalist and a former politician get together to discuss the state of the world, and where we’re heading? Yuval Noah Harari is an Israeli medieval and military historian best known for his panoramic surveys of human history, including Sapiens, Homo Deus and, most recently, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI. Maria Ressa, joint winner of the Nobel peace prize, is a Filipino and American journalist who co-founded the news website Rappler. And Rory Stewart is a British academic and former Conservative MP, writer and co-host of The Rest Is Politics podcast. Their conversation ranged over the rise of AI, the crisis in democracy and the prospect of a Trump-Putin wedding, but began by considering a question central to all of their work: how to live a good life in an increasingly fragmented and fragile world?

YNH People have been arguing about this for thousands of years. The main contribution of modern liberalism and democracy was to try to agree to disagree; that different people can have very different concepts of what a good life is, and they can still live together in the same society, agreeing on some very basic rules of conduct.

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Seth Harp in Harper’s Magazine:

After the midair collision in January over the Potomac River between an Army helicopter and a regional jet packed with young figure skaters and their parents flying out of Wichita, Kansas, and considering the ongoing travails of the Boeing Company, which saw at least five of its airplanes crash last year, I was so concerned about the state of U.S. aviation that, when called on by this magazine to attend President Donald Trump’s military parade in Washington, on June 14, 2025, I decided to drive all the way from my home in Austin, Texas, even though it cost me two days behind the wheel and a gas bill as expensive as a plane ticket.

I was no less concerned about the prospect of standing on the National Mall on the day of the parade, a celebration of the two-hundred-fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the U.S. Army, which happened to coincide with Trump’s seventy-ninth birthday. The forecast predicted appropriately foul weather for the occasion, and there would be a number of helicopters, of both modern and Vietnam-era vintage, flying over the parade grounds. The Army’s recent track record didn’t bode well for those positioned under the flight path. In the past two years, there had been at least twenty-four serious accidents involving helicopters and nineteen fatalities, culminating with the collision over the Potomac, the deadliest incident in American commercial aviation since 2001.

More here.

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Meet Cute in Menlo Park

“Please don’t close the door to our future”
                                                   – The Jackson 5

I see my father—a thirteen-year-old boy in a tie
and slacks approaching a girl, my mother.

He holds a shoebox full of rocks. The fog
has just burned off the morning—
leaving the day bright and dry. Do you want
to see what I found? he asks her.

The other neighborhood children play cops
and robbers—dodging bullets
and putting the bad guys in handcuffs
at the shore of the bay. I know my mother

was skinny (like my sister) and her mother
would go weeks without re-pressing
her hair—so her edges must be beginning
to bloom back into afro.

Why do you dress so funny, like a pastor? she asks.
I see her looking at her jeans that fray
down the pants leg, and the green Chuck
Taylors—see her feel a new hole wearing
into the sole of them.

My mama always wants her children to look nice, he says.
She counters, Well, you look like you just got out
of church. They both laugh.

Their story begins much like it ends—with children
trying to understand pain, curious to feel
any kind of love.

Is it fair for me to tell you what will become
of these children?

In this moment, my father must think of only one thing:
the gap, still widening, between my mother’s teeth
as he opens the box to an assortment
of wet pillars of earth.

My mother reaches out to touch the collection,
her fingers moving across a red one—flat,
smooth, and marbled. You can have it, if you want,
my father says. She smiles. What’s your name?

Timothy Hughes, he says.
  I’m Kimmy, pastor Hughes

by Erica Hughes
from 3Cents Magazine

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Leo Kim at Noema Magazine:

According to the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, the 20th century’s form of life also began with the air. Sloterdijk puts the moment at 6 p.m. on April 22, 1915, near Ypres, when a German regiment under the command of Col. Max Peterson unleashed chlorine gas in warfare for the first time. Previously, violence in war had been directed at the human body; this attack targeted the “living organism’s immersion in a breathable milieu,” as Sloterdijk writes in “Terror From The Air.” “Instead of aiming at the soldiers … it targeted the air.” As troops were engulfed by this deadly atmosphere, they began to foam at the mouth, spit blood and die. What was once a background feature of the environment was thus “explicated,” transformed into a discrete resource that could be mobilized toward strategic ends.

Sloterdijk urges us to recognize how air is materialized as functional, extractable, manipulable, subject to human intervention. By situating the birth of the 20th century in this moment of terror, he suggests that we are not the inheritors of Boyle’s experimental worldview as much as Col. Peterson’s instrumentalized, manipulated, weaponized air.

more here.

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From Nature:

The drug discovery and development landscape is plagued by inefficiency, risk and astronomical cost. Clinical success rates languish below 10%, convoluted in- and out-licensing workflows erode precious patent life, and industry estimates suggest that biopharma companies write off some $15 billion every year on deprioritized candidates. At the same time, more than 90% of oncology drugs—and a significant proportion of all therapeutics—will lose patent exclusivity within the next five years, creating a looming innovation shortfall. Partex is here to bridge that gap. As the world’s largest artificial intelligence (AI)-driven drug-asset manager, Partex supercharges pipelines, resurrects shelved compounds and slashes development time to clinic—revolutionizing discovery and development at every step.

From data ocean to drug assets

At the heart of Partex lies an unparalleled ocean of real-time data—650 terabytes of public sources, 270 terabytes of proprietary studies and more than 2 million de-identified patient records—which are continuously updated and fully auditable (Fig. 1). More than 200 specialized AI models roam this data landscape, rapidly delivering actionable insights across the entire research and development (R&D) continuum.

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Robert M. Ehrenreich and Alexandra M. Lord at JSTOR Daily:

Open one of the drawers in a collections cabinet at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and you’ll find a small booklet of Efka cigarette papers. The papers are part of a broader story the museum tells about Nazism, corporate collaboration, and wartime propaganda.

But walk just a half mile across the National Mall to the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, and you’ll find a very different story about this particular artifact. At the Smithsonian, Efka rolling papers are part of a collection of objects associated with the use of marijuana and the counterculture movement of the 1960s and 1970s in the United States.

How did these objects come to tell two such diametrically opposed stories?

After World War II, German companies aggressively worked to whitewash their Nazi past and rebrand themselves. By the 1960s and 1970s, as the youth market exploded and memories of war faded, advertising campaigns for German companies such as Volkswagen promoted their products as symbols of the counterculture. Across America, young men and women strapped on their Birkenstocks, hopped into their VW Beetles, and rolled a joint with Efka papers—all before heading off to protest what they often described as “American fascism.”

more here.

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Emma Cline in The Paris Review:

Italy is not always the salvation of English-speaking people—but it does often seem that way. In film, in literature, in food, it’s the place where you go to find yourself. The real you, the one whose blazing depths have been obscured by the cold crust of convention. In The Enchanted April—the 1922 bestseller that turned Positano into a tourist destination—Elizabeth von Arnim suggested that the Mediterranean climate could burn off the impurities of the English soul, as if by a kind of Italian alchemy. English travelers from Byron to E. M. Forster advanced a similar sort of travel magic as a means for getting in touch with one’s soul. Keats, wracked with tuberculosis, went to Italy hoping to save his life.

While the sunny views may have limited curative powers, Italy, for the traveler not coughing blood onto their bedsheets, still seems to promise a kinder, more elemental world. Especially in contrast to the modern gray drizzle of England: in Rachel Cusk’s memoir of her family’s months in Italy, the decision to bolt from their Bristol suburb is prompted by an ad on the street with the tagline “Is there more to life than this?”

Well, is there?

More here.

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Coleen Murphy in Nature:

Super Agers, by clinician Eric Topol, has just been published, but it was almost surreal for me as a US scientist to read the book now, with its optimistic take on the state of the medical field. Despite their extreme promise, many of the lines of research that Topol describes have been subject to funding cuts by the Trump administration since the book was written. For example, although Super Agers argues that we are on the verge of treating a host of diseases — from viral infections, such as influenza, HIV and rabies, to tuberculosis and several types of cancer — using the mRNA technology underlying COVID-19 vaccines, that sort of research is now on the chopping block in the United States.

Nevertheless, Topol has assembled an admirable and comprehensive review of cutting-edge approaches to tackling many illnesses that cut human lives short. He explains each disease and the current state of treatments — including an impressive overview of ongoing and recently completed clinical trials — and explores future possibilities. These include advances in CRISPR gene editing and stem-cell techniques aimed at treating blood disorders, cancers, Alzheimer’s disease and more. He covers an immense amount of material in an accessible manner, and has well-supported recommendations for readers.

More here.

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Adam Mastroianni at Experimental History:

I meet a lot of people who don’t like their jobs, and when I ask them what they’d rather do instead, about 75% say something like, “Oh, I dunno, I’d really love to run a little coffee shop.” If I’m feeling mischievous that day, I ask them one question: “Where would you get the coffee beans?”

If that’s a stumper, here are some followups:

• • Which kind of coffee mug is best?
  • How much does a La Marzocco espresso machine cost?
  • Would you bake your blueberry muffins in-house or would you buy them from a third party?
  • What software do you want to use for your point-of-sale system? What about for scheduling shifts?
  • What do you do when your assistant manager calls you at 6am and says they can’t come into work because they have diarrhea?

The point of the Coffee Beans Procedure is this: if you can’t answer those questions, if you don’t even find them interesting, then you should not open a coffee shop, because this is how you will spend your days as a cafe owner. You will not be sitting droopy-lidded in an easy chair, sipping a latte and greeting your regulars as you page through Anna Karenina. You will be running a small business that sells hot bean water.

The Coffee Beans Procedure is a way of doing what psychologists call unpacking.

More here.

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Anil Ananthaswamy in Quanta:

Here’s a test for infants: Show them a glass of water on a desk. Hide it behind a wooden board. Now move the board toward the glass. If the board keeps going past the glass, as if it weren’t there, are they surprised? Many 6-month-olds are, and by a year, almost all children have an intuitive notion of an object’s permanence, learned through observation. Now some artificial intelligence models do too.

Researchers have developed an AI system that learns about the world via videos and demonstrates a notion of “surprise” when presented with information that goes against the knowledge it has gleaned.

The model, created by Meta and called Video Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture (V-JEPA), does not make any assumptions about the physics of the world contained in the videos. Nonetheless, it can begin to make sense of how the world works.

More here.

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Antara Haldar at Project Syndicate:

According to the existential-risk researcher Luke Kemp, globalization has produced a planetary “Goliath.” Unlike Rome or Rapa Nui, today’s world is integrated through and through, which means that any new stressor – a climate shock, a pandemic, a financial crisis – can trigger a sudden, irreversible, global cascade. Worse, with seven of the climate scientist Johan Rockström’s nine planetary boundaries having been breached, Earth has already thrown down the gauntlet for our civilization.

Yet ruin is not destiny. David Graeber and David Wengrow’s 2022 book, The Dawn of Everything, challenged the deterministic view of civilizational evolution. Collapse is not a matter of fate, but a failure of imagination. Despite writing during the Great Depression, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, within a century, technology could solve the “economic problem,” leaving humans free for the “art of life” as work commitments shrank to 15 hours per week and inequality receded.

The progressive journalists Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s recent book, Abundance, revives this sensibility.

More here.

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Kate Wolf speaks to J. Hoberman at the LARB:

Kate Wolf speaks to J. Hoberman about his latest book, Everything is Now: Primal Happenings, Radical Music, Underground Movies, and the 1960s New York Avant-Garde. It recaptures the frenetic, creative simultaneity of New York in the 60s, rendering the era’s cultural explosion in real time. The events of a single decade, let alone a single year, or month, or even day, can be staggering. Hoberman compiles the work of various musicians, painters, filmmakers and poets who gave birth to everything from Conceptual Art, Fluxus, Free Jazz, Guerrilla Theater, Protest Folk, Black Arts, and Underground Film, and more often than not, faced censorship and legal consequences for their innovations. The book reifies the link between artistic vanguardism and progressive politics, exploring the web of connection between artists and fate of the city—and country— at a time of ruthless redevelopment, labor strikes, atomic bomb scares, and emerging civil rights battles.

more here.

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John Adamson at Literary Review:

In a prescient essay published in 2000, the Princeton historian Robert Darnton – one of the grandees of the historical profession – proposed a new kind of history, one prompted as much by recent developments in Silicon Valley as anything gleaned in the archives. He called for ‘a general attack on the problem of how societies made sense of events and transmitted information about them, something that might be called the history of communication’. This, he argued, had to be much larger than just a history of newspapers. It had to encompass how information spread by word of mouth, the places where people convened to trade it and the multiple professions engaged in its dispersal.

In the ensuing quarter-century, a select historical band has taken up this challenge – notably Andrew Pettegree in The Invention of News (2014), which focused on print and its circulation in early modern Europe. Darnton himself, in his most recent book, The Revolutionary Temper (2023), charted news networks in France in the four decades before the Revolution, and extended the analysis of what constituted ‘news’ beyond the confines of print to include manuscript letters and the multifarious forms of oral transmission: coffee-house gossip, news bulletins bawled out on street corners by pedlars and hurdy-gurdy players, the conversations at Paris’s established hubs of news exchange in the gardens of the Luxembourg and the Palais-Royal.

more here.

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Dylan Riley in Sidecar:

Among the many lessons of Trump’s return to the White House, a crucial one concerns civil society: a mushy and frustrating, but nevertheless inescapable, concept. Taken up from Hegel’s Philosophy of Right – where Bürgerliche Gesellschaft referred ambiguously to both the emerging realm of market exchange and the late medieval Stände – Marx sought to lay bare its underlying structure and laws of motion. But in making this intellectual breakthrough he lost something of the political and cultural importance of the sphere of associations and interest groups that characterized this ‘second level of the superstructure’, wedged, as Gramsci pointed out, between the productive economy and the state. (True, in his analysis of Bonapartism Marx returned to this earlier meaning, counterposing the overweening late-absolutist French state to civil society).

A separate lineage runs from De Tocqueville through Durkheim to contemporary political sociology and political science. It focused on the virtues of intermediate structures (recalling in some ways Montesquieu’s intermediate powers) whose main function was to contain the excesses of modern democracy – a regime which, De Tocqueville claimed, could be made compatible with liberty on the condition of the existence of a flourishing associational sphere (functional substitute for the great appanage families of the old regime). It was Arendt who fused the Marxian and De Tocquevillian traditions in her account of modern totalitarianism (although there is no evidence that she had read Gramsci). For Arendt, the key precondition for totalitarianism was the pulverization of civil society, which produced the isolation of mass society, full of disoriented individuals available for demagogic mass movements.

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Suzanne Schneider in NY Review of Books:

In his 1892 book The Grammar of Science, the pioneering British statistician and eugenicist Karl Pearson warned readers that “if society is to shape its own future,…we must be peculiarly cautious that in following our strong social instincts we do not at the same time weaken society by rendering the propagation of bad stock more and more easy.” Since “no degenerate and feeble stock will ever be converted into healthy and sound stock by the accumulated effects of education, good laws, and sanitary surroundings,” he argued, the only remedy was to winnow out corrupt genetic material via the evolutionary struggle for survival—assuming no pesky do-gooders got in the way of Mother Nature.

“Arguments about politics always rest on claims about human nature,” Quinn Slobodian reminds us in his new intellectual history of the American far right. Hayek’s Bastards focuses on a coalition of libertarians, traditionalists, and paleoconservatives who, a century after Pearson, returned to theories of immutable genetic and racial differences to make the case for market supremacy and a minimalist state, a current of thinking Slobodian calls “new fusionism.” While a previous generation of conservatives had welded religious traditionalism to free market principles—the original fusionism associated with Frank Meyer and the National Review—their ideological successors found evolutionary psychology, genetics, and biological anthropology more useful.

More here.

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