Sara Kozameh at the Los Angeles Review of Books:

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 explicit goal to “bring about hunger, desperation, and the overthrow” of the regime.

While a trade embargo implies legal constraints on bilateral economic trade, the term blockade carries a heavier connotation.

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Andrew Curry in Science:

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.

Year after year, the researchers have returned to find more and more headless skeletons on the outskirts of Vráble, a small village 100 kilometers east of Bratislava. “Everywhere we started to dig, we found bones. Everywhere we were sitting or standing, there were bones,” says Katharina Fuchs, a biological 
anthropologist at Kiel University (KU) who has excavated in Vráble every summer since 2021. In the summer of 2022, she and colleagues from KU and Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra recovered the skeletal remains of 34 people, piled on top of each other two or three deep in a space about the size of a parking spot. With the exception of one child, none of them had heads.

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From UC San Diego Today:

A new University of California San Diego study offers compelling evidence that GLP-1 receptor agonists — the class of drugs behind Ozempic, Wegovy and Mounjaro, for example — may do more than regulate blood sugar and weight. In an analysis of more than 6,800 colon cancer patients across all University of California Health sites, researchers found that those taking glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) medications were less than half as likely to die within five years compared to those who weren’t on the drugs (15.5% vs. 37.1%).

…The survival benefit appeared most pronounced in patients with very high BMI (over 35), hinting that GLP-1 drugs may help counteract the inflammatory and metabolic conditions that worsen colon cancer prognosis. Researchers believe several biological mechanisms could explain the link. Beyond regulating blood sugar, GLP-1 receptor agonists reduce systemic inflammation, improve insulin sensitivity and promote weight loss — all factors that can dampen tumor-promoting pathways. Laboratory studies also suggest that GLP-1 drugs may directly prevent cancer cell growth, trigger cancer cell death and reshape the tumor microenvironment.

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In The Beginning

We are in the book of Correlations:
In the beginning was the Void
like a turn-down of nothingness.
In that pre-dream of Creation, all things
equally plausible, the Maker sees:
If creativity is the control
of chaos through expression, then Creation
could abridge inchoate Chaos itself.
In a blink He gives the Word, and the black Void
floods with the hot thought of light.
In beams of brightness daylight posts its coming,
its going in scenes for which Bach
might have writ the Oratorio.
In the gravity outlay that follows, He sorts through
great swirling masses of alliterate star matter.
A notorious perfectionist, He goes through
art gum erasers at a prodigious rate.
The sun He moves around like a flood lamp–
such heat and aspiration coming
from a dime-sized portion of the sky!
He notices the moon, how its light
transliterates the sun’s. He tries it in evening,
but the stars dim in its government.
He tries it in morning, but the blue
of astronauts shows through. Unable
to decide, He tries it from time to time.
But then He looks back, sees he missed a ball
of consequence, a planet in its heat and heart.
He paints it with water, makes it a water ball.

But in oceans alone He does not see
the sum of things. “I see strokes of reef
like brush strokes of incompletion,
I see good growing latitudes gone to waste.
Let there be marked volcanics. Let islands
of igneous intrusion rise in the surge,
a cave at a time. And now,” He says,
“let the rest flow in Anent, Adroit, Ajoint.”
With fructifying rain He greens whole continents.
In the complete fragrance of the original earth,
hand over hand for light, the whitest green
breaks through. Black boughs put on green flesh.
Mushrooms, almost meat, almost speak.
Grubs, all maw, bore the loam’s abundance.
The size of hands, birds populate the hills,
make the land loud with bird bluster,
the plural voice of the island thrush. Recumbent kine
He makes to rest their wrinkled butts in meadow grass.
At this, the sixth instanter of Creation,
He rests his case. It was risky.
It was successful. How could He but be pleased?
And He partakes of the deep rest that Sunday enjowls.

by John Barr

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John Banville in The Guardian:

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Eric Drexler at AI Prospects:

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.

But these expectations rest on features specific to the evolutionary heritage of biological intelligence.1 When we examine how AI systems develop and operate, we find differences that undermine these intuitions. Selection pressures exist in both cases, but they’re different pressures.

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Calum Lister Matheson in The Conversation:

Everyone has looked up at the clouds and seen faces, animals, objects. Human brains are hardwired for this kind of whimsy. But some people – perhaps a surprising number – look to the sky and see government plots and wicked deeds written there. Conspiracy theorists say that contrails – long streaks of condensation left by aircraft – are actually chemtrails, clouds of chemical or biological agents dumped on the unsuspecting public for nefarious purposes. Different motives are ascribed, from weather control to mass poisoning.

The chemtrails theory has circulated since 1996, when conspiracy theorists misinterpreted a U.S. Air Force research paper about weather modification, a valid topic of research. Social media and conservative news outlets have since magnified the conspiracy theory. One recent study notes that X, formerly Twitter, is a particularly active node of this “broad online community of conspiracy.”

I’m a communications researcher who studies conspiracy theories. The thoroughly debunked chemtrails theory provides a textbook example of how conspiracy theories work.

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Jenna Ahart in Nature:

A gel-based artificial tongue can determine the spiciness of a wide range of foods, from the forgiving bell pepper to the more formidable ‘facing heaven’ chili of Sichuan cuisine. The device, as the researchers report¹ in ACS Sensors, might be the secret to determining the heat levels of spicy foods without risking any human taste buds. The artificial tongue itself is not a new feat. Scientists have created similar devices that can use electronic sensors to detect sweet, sour, spicy and umami tastes. But the authors of the new paper wanted to focus on spiciness in particular and to measure spice levels as precisely as possible, which is especially important for quality control in food, says co-author Jing Hu, a chemical engineer at the East China University of Science and Technology in Shanghai.

The team’s solution was “inspired by the spicy-neutralizing effect of milk”, they write in the paper. Milk “proteins that affect our perception of spiciness” relieve the burn of a spicy dish, explains Carolyn Ross, a food scientist at Washington State University in Pullman.

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Kermit Pattison in The Harvard Gazette:

A few weeks after their arrival at the College, 15 first-year students settled into chairs for an unusual class — one with no answers.

The brainchild of Dean of Science Jeff Lichtman, “Genuinely Hard Problems in Science” explores mysteries of the natural world that have stubbornly resisted the best efforts to crack them. How did life emerge from non-biological matter? How did single cells evolve into complex life? What mechanisms drive the aging process — and can they be reversed? What is the relationship between brain anatomy and mental illness?

In this class, there is no assumption that scientific authorities are right. Rather than training conformists who follow their elders down well-worn routes — and possibly to dead ends — the instructors want out-of-the-box thinkers who can blaze new pathways.

“What we’re trying to do,” explained Lichtman, “is transform science, 15 students at a time.”

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Tristan Moyle at Aeon Magazine:

In contemporary parlance, the most common framework that ancient moral philosophy operated within is known as ethical partialism. For the ethical partialist, our relationships determine the reasons we have to act (or refrain from acting). That is why the question ‘Who belongs?’ is so important: the answer informs us about the ethical relationships in which we are implicated and by which we are obligated.

This ancient way of thinking about ethical matters is comprehensively rejected by dominant forms of modern moral philosophy. Whether deontological or consequentialist, the underlying ethical framework is impartialist. For the impartialist, factoring in personal relationships when deciding what to do is to introduce prejudice, parochialism and bias into one’s moral thinking. The question ‘Who belongs?’ is rejected as a legitimate starting point. For the utilitarian Jeremy Bentham, the essential question is rather ‘Can they suffer?’ Whether I have a relationship to the being is morally irrelevant. Objectivity in one’s moral thinking requires strict neutrality. That is what justice is thought to demand.

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McNeil Taylor at Cabinet Magazine:

The Greek island of Syros is mentioned in The Odyssey: the titular hero’s swineherd, Eumaeus, tells us that his home island is “not so packed with people, still a good place, though, fine for sheep and cattle, rich in wine and wheat.”¹ Approaching Syros’s harbor city of Ermoupolis today, however, travelers weaned on these Arcadian visions will instead be confronted by the fruits of nineteenth-century industry. When Gérard de Nerval landed in Ermoupolis in 1842, the new city, draped over two vertiginous hills, began to melt in the hallucinatory swirl of Parisian flânerie: the view suggested first a sugared loaf of bread, then a Babylonian city, and finally the floating citadel of Laputa from Gulliver’s Travels (1726).² Surreal, exotic, futuristic, Ermoupolis was far from what he had been led to expect from the birthplace of Western civilization.

Nerval’s fanciful vision nonetheless attests to the seismic upheavals of the modern nation-state that were still tremoring in the 1840s: only twenty years earlier, a large influx of Greek Orthodox refugees from Chios, fleeing massacre by the Turks, had arrived on the island. It was one of many instances of diaspora, population exchange, and exile that would define the traumatic course of Greek history up until our present day.

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Paul Lay interviews Dan Wang on how China engineered its way to global power status, in Engelsberg Ideas:

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Jeet Heer in The Nation:

The prospect of chaos and war excited Jeffrey Epstein. The late New York financier and child abuser kept a keen eye on news about foreign conflicts that could be exploited for commercial gain. On February 21, 2014, Epstein sent an e-mail to Ehud Barak, the former Israeli prime minister, with whom he would partner the following year as investors in a security tech firm Reporty Homeland Security (later renamed Carbyne). Epstein wrote, “with civil unrest exploding in ukraine syria, somolia [sic], libya, and the desperation of those in power, isn’t this perfect for you.” Barak tried to tamp down his friend’s enthusiasm, noting, “You’re right [in] a way. But not simple to transform it into a cash flow.”

This exchange, which was reported by Drop Site News, gets at the heart of one of the more hidden aspects of the Epstein scandal. Epstein’s name is inextricably linked with sexual predation, as it should be. But it should just as readily be linked to global militarism and authoritarianism. Epstein trafficked not just in the bodies of the children he abused but also in social connections that could bring elites together. He well understood that the “desperation of those in power” could make them eager to buy what he was selling: connections with other powerful figures and security systems to clamp down on dissent.

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Ana Lucia Araujo in Aeon:

Over the past century, historians of the United States have made increasing efforts to challenge the predominant 19th-century view that slavery in the US South was somewhat a benevolent institution. The old, idealised and paternalistic understanding of the history of slavery featured prominently in novels and motion pictures like Gone with the Wind (1939). Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, in his 1918 survey of American slavery, and other influential historians promoted this distortion too, claiming that slave owners in the US South treated their enslaved property with kindness, by providing them decent rations of food and good clothing, while encouraging the formation of stable family ties, education and Christianity.

In the years between the First World War and the Second World War, the historians W E B Du Bois and Carter G Woodson challenged this misrepresentation, stressing the profits made by US slave traders and owners, and underscoring the cruelty of bondage in the US. Later, the historians Frederic Bancroft and Kenneth M Stampp followed suit, noting the ubiquity of family separation and sexual violence, and the near-impossibility of emancipation. The misleading view of slavery as a benign institution didn’t survive the post-Second World War period, which brought racism into new disrepute. However, into the 1960s and beyond, some scholars continued to see slavery in Latin America, especially in Brazil, as less significant and milder than in the US. There were different reasons for this view, some deriving from the fact that the US was a Protestant country in a mostly Catholic hemisphere. Catholicism predominated in French, Spanish and Portuguese colonies in the Americas, and the strong influence of the Catholic Church on Iberian legal codes and custom influenced the practice of slavery. In the French and Spanish colonies in the Americas, as well as in Brazil, the doctrines of Catholicism gave enslaved people some rights, including the right to marry and the ability to buy their freedom.

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Quentin Bruneau in Phenomenal World:

How should we explain periods of profound global transformation? Since the late nineteenth century, historically-minded scholars have viewed socio-political change as a reflection of property relations and technological shifts in the productive process. Capitalism was positioned as the principal driver of the international state system, with states broadly operating in the interest of maintaining capitalist social relations. In recent years, however, a parallel tradition of thought has gained ground. In this tradition, the bureaucratic and military consolidation of states operates as the driver of economic relations. From this perspective, capitalist forms of exploitation appear as a means to finance the state’s coercive power and navigate competition between states internationally. The relation between states and markets underpins nearly every major challenge of our time, from climate change, to war, to austerity and sovereign debt. Should we understand these developments through the interests of Capital, or should we instead conceive of them as the product of inter-state competition and power? The question is not merely of analytical interest; where we place emphasis directly informs the sort of solutions we envision to global problems. If climate change and war are the result of inter-state competition, greater cooperation can lead to a solution. If they are the result of Capitalism, instead, they will remain unresolved until we do away with the economic system itself. In what follows, I survey this longstanding debate and introduce an important and overlooked turningpoint: the rise of Great Power politics. Ultimately, however, I argue that our global order cannot be understood outside of the complex social contexts out of which it emerges—contexts which cannot be reduced to any single dimension alone.

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Anand Giridharadas in The New York Times:

As journalists comb through the Epstein emails, surfacing the name of one fawning luminary after another, there is a collective whisper of “How could they?” How could such eminent people, belonging to such prestigious institutions, succumb to this? A close read of the thousands of messages makes it less surprising. When Jeffrey Epstein, a financier turned convicted sex offender, needed friends to rehabilitate him, he knew where to turn: a power elite practiced at disregarding pain.

At the dark heart of this story is a sex criminal and his victims — and his enmeshment with President Trump. But it is also a tale about a powerful social network in which some, depending on what they knew, were perhaps able to look away because they had learned to look away from so much other abuse and suffering: the financial meltdowns some in the network helped trigger, the misbegotten wars some in the network pushed, the overdose crisis some of them enabled, the monopolies they defended, the inequality they turbocharged, the housing crisis they milked, the technologies they failed to protect people against.

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Nora Bradford in Quanta Magazine:

Such moments of insight are written across history. According to the Roman architect and engineer Vitruvius, in the third century BCE the Greek mathematician Archimedes suddenly exclaimed “Eureka!” after he slid into a bathtub and saw the water level rise by an amount equal to his submerged volume (although this tale may be apocryphal(opens a new tab)). In the 17th century, according to lore, Sir Isaac Newton had a breakthrough in understanding gravity after an apple fell on his head. In the early 1900s, Einstein came to a sudden realization that “if a man falls freely, he would not feel his weight,” which led him to his theory of relativity, as he later described in a lecture.

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