Simple Secrets to a Healthier Life

Amanda Schupak in The New York Times:

Parent less, play more.

If your kid isn’t asking for help, leave them alone! Spend less time managing their feelings — especially unpleasant ones — and more time sharing things that you love. Not everything needs to be a learning experience.

— Carla Naumburg Clinical social worker and the author of “How to Stop Losing Your Sh*t With Your Kids”

A healthier future is possible.

If “someday” were tomorrow, what would you do differently today? Track the most important predictors of your health and keep them healthy. Consult with your doctor, but the CliffsNotes are: Aim for blood pressure under 120/80 and LDL (that’s “bad” cholesterol) less than 70.

Food is medicine. Food is love. Enjoy it as both.

What you eat connects you to your culture and the people you care about. So let loose a little when you have something to celebrate. The rest of the time, choose foods that nourish your body.

— Dr. Nate Wood Director of culinary medicine at Yale School of Medicine

More here.

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Tuesday, January 27, 2026

Should we sell our kidneys?

Paul Sagar in The Guardian:

People who experience kidney failure need either lifelong dialysis or a transplant to survive. Yet even for those lucky enough to get a transplant, that is by no means the end of the story. Kidneys from deceased donors last an average of 10 to 15 years, those from a living person 20 to 25. If (or rather, when) a transplant fails, the affected patient once again needs dialysis or a donated organ.

The UK is not unusual in having far more people who need kidneys than there are kidneys available. Every country in the world has this problem. With one exception: Iran.

What is different about Iran? It is the only state that has legalised the sale of kidneys. This began in 1988, and means the country has no waiting lists. You can expect to pay about $5,000 for a new kidney, subject to a price cap adjusted for inflation and enforced by the government. (By contrast, a kidney bought on the black market elsewhere can cost up to $120,000.) The proceeds go to the donor, who can be a friend or family relative, or just somebody who needs the money and happens to be a biological match.

More here.

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Dario Amodei: The Adolescence of Technology

Dario Amodei at his own website:

There is a scene in the movie version of Carl Sagan’s book Contact where the main character, an astronomer who has detected the first radio signal from an alien civilization, is being considered for the role of humanity’s representative to meet the aliens. The international panel interviewing her asks, “If you could ask [the aliens] just one question, what would it be?” Her reply is: “I’d ask them, ‘How did you do it? How did you evolve, how did you survive this technological adolescence without destroying yourself?” When I think about where humanity is now with AI—about what we’re on the cusp of—my mind keeps going back to that scene, because the question is so apt for our current situation, and I wish we had the aliens’ answer to guide us. I believe we are entering a rite of passage, both turbulent and inevitable, which will test who we are as a species. Humanity is about to be handed almost unimaginable power, and it is deeply unclear whether our social, political, and technological systems possess the maturity to wield it.

More here.

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Cinema and Evil: The Fall of Otrar

Kent Jones at The Current:

The structure of Otrar is certainly all of a piece with German’s own work. But as a total film experience, it feels distinctly different from Khrustalyov, Ivan Lapshin, or German’s posthumously completed Hard to Be a God (2013, a years-in-the-making adaptation cowritten by German and Karmalita, traces of which can be felt in Otrar). “They were two of the most renowned filmmakers of Soviet cinema,” said Amirkulov in conversation with production designer Umirzak Shmanov. “We were, of course, very lucky to have them as the screenwriters. The script was extensive, extremely cumbersome, and completely uncompromising in the sense that they never settled for bypassing historical facts or circumstances, and they never came up with any easy solutions. On the one hand, it was very difficult to film. On the other hand, it was incredibly energizing because the script itself read like good literature. That’s why I’m grateful to fate for bringing me together with people like Alexei and Svetlana. I learned a great deal from their script because I had to put in a lot of effort, thought, and research to bring it to life. I even studied music, painting, read a lot of literature about the period, and watched films to match the material they had written.”

more here.

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Let the Chinese cars in

Noah Smith at Noahpinion:

The U.S. should follow Canada’s lead on EV tariffs, slashing them to a very low level while initially limiting the number of annual imports. While Canada’s deal involved only vague promises of Chinese investment in the Canadian auto industry, the U.S. should require far more firm commitments, along with strong incentives for local sourcing of components like batteries and motors. And the dangers of espionage and sabotage can probably be minimized through additional measures.

There are a number of reasons that this would be in America’s own self-interest.

More here.

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Why an Agnostic Animal-Rights Activist Went to Seminary

Jay Caspian Kang at the New Yorker:

Two years ago, I wrote about Wayne Hsiung, the founder of the animal-liberation group Direct Action Everywhere, or DxE. Hsiung is among the most interesting activists I’ve encountered, in part because he faces a nearly impossible task: the public does not like animal-rights activists, and, even if people don’t want beagles to be tortured in testing facilities, it’s relatively easy for them to turn a blind eye to such things. That challenge of advancing a cause that not many people will get behind forced Hsiung and DxE to come up with increasingly novel ways to further their aims. Most famously, they engaged in so-called open rescues, breaking into breeding facilities and factory farms, basically kidnapping distressed animals, and then giving them new homes. Hsiung’s mission, outside of saving animals, was to get arrested and charged with various felonies so that he could then represent himself in court and argue that helping an animal in distress is legally justified.

But, last year, Hsiung made a surprising announcement: he was enrolling in a seminary. In a blog post about the decision, he wrote, “I have spent most of the last 20 years of my life understanding the power of disruption. But one cannot disrupt, effectively or sustainably, when one stands alone.

more here.

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What were the first animals?

Ewen Callaway in Nature:

Which animals came first? For more than a century, most evidence suggested that sponges, immobile filter-feeders that lack muscles, neurons and other specialized tissues, were the first animal lineages to emerge. Then, in 2008, a genomic study pointed to a head-scratching rival1: dazzling, translucent predators called comb jellies, or ctenophores, with nerves, muscles and other sophisticated features.

That single study ignited a debate that has raged for nearly 20 years, sparking fierce arguments about how complexity evolved in animals. But after dozens of studies — some of which analysed and reanalysed the same data and reached different conclusions — the debate has become entrenched, some researchers say. “Where it might have been healthy for people to engage with curiosity and an interest in finding the truth together, it became a battle,” says Nicole King, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who co-authored a paper last November that landed cautiously on ‘team sponge’2.

More here.

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Tuesday Poem

Everything That Happens Can Be Called Aging

I have more love than ever.
Our kids have kids soon to have kids.
I need them. I need everyone
to come over to the house,
sleep on the floor, on the couches
in the front room. I need noise,
too many people in too small a space,
I need dancing, the spilling of drinks,
the loud pronouncements
over music, the verbal sparring,
the broken dishes, the wealth.
I need it all flying apart.
My friends to slam against me,
to hold me, to say they love me.
I need mornings to ask for favors
and forgiveness. I need to give,
have all my emotions rattled,
my family to be greedy,
to keep coming, to keep asking
and taking. I need no resolution,
just the constant turmoil of living.
Give me the bottom of the river,
all the unadorned, unfinished,
unpraised moments, one good turn
on the luxuriant wheel.

by Carl Adamshick
From Saint Friend
McSweeney’s Poetry Series, 2014

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A Mason’s Hand

Ali Akbar Natiq in Granta:

‘Haji sahib, these kids are beyond me. I can’t teach them any more. Please make some other arrangement,’ he said, throwing his hands in the air.

‘Why do I need another arrangement when I have you?’ Haji Altaf sounded apologetic. ‘I have tried every good tutor in the city but nobody has lasted even a month. I thought you were from a good family and needed a job. You are the only one who can teach these rascals. You can go and look for another job but while you are looking, please keep teaching them.’

‘Haji sahib, that’s all very well. But your grandsons don’t respect me, they don’t listen to a single thing I tell them. I am wasting their time as well as my own. I do hard manual labour all day – I just don’t have the energy to do this too.’ Asghar started to walk out of the door but stopped and turned. ‘Haji sahib, if you really have any sympathy for me, see if you can get me a proper job.’

‘Okay,’ Haji said. ‘But I don’t want you to spend the rest of your life building minarets for mosques.’

More here.

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Monday, January 26, 2026

Tracing the California lineage of Charles Bukowski’s publisher

Joshua Bodwell at the Los Angeles Review of Books:

By the mid-1960s, Charles Bukowski had become a sort of king of the underground, the most published poet in the “littles,” as the magazines, alternative newspapers, and small presses that proliferated in the 1960s were known. John Martin read Bukowski’s poems in obscure, poorly printed zines and bought his thin, saddle-stapled chapbooks released in press runs of perhaps a couple hundred copies. Martin believed Bukowski was a genius: “I thought he was the contemporary Walt Whitman, writing right from the street.”

The nascent publisher and the writer with a cult following began to correspond, and shortly after the new year of 1966, Martin visited Bukowski at the poet’s rented 1920s bungalow in East Hollywood. They made an odd pair. Martin was tall, trim, and bespectacled; what hair he had was red-tinged. Bukowski was greasy-haired with a beer paunch, his face pockmarked. Yet their ambitions complimented one another. Martin left with a sheaf of unpublished poems he believed were “immortal.”

More here.

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A computational parallel to collective intelligence in human groups

Junsol Kim, Shiyang Lai, Nino Scherrer, Blaise Agüera y Arcas, and James Evans in a new paper:

Through quantitative analysis and mechanistic interpretability methods applied to reasoning traces, we find that reasoning models like DeepSeek-R1 and QwQ-32B exhibit much greater perspective diversity than instruction-tuned models, activating broader conflict between heterogeneous personality- and expertise-related features during reasoning. This multi-agent structure manifests in conversational behaviors, including question-answering, perspective shifts, and the reconciliation of conflicting views, and in socio-emotional roles that characterize sharp back-and-forth conversations, together accounting for the accuracy advantage in reasoning tasks. Controlled reinforcement learning experiments reveal that base models increase conversational behaviors when rewarded solely for reasoning accuracy, and fine-tuning models with conversational scaffolding accelerates reasoning improvement over base models. These findings indicate that the social organization of thought enables effective exploration of solution spaces. We suggest that reasoning models establish a computational parallel to collective intelligence in human groups, where diversity enables superior problem-solving when systematically structured, which suggests new opportunities for agent organization to harness the wisdom of crowds.

More here.

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The Middle Powers Step Up

Nathan Gardels at Noema:

When the United States summarily defected from the world order it had built since the end of World War II, effectively joining the revisionist powers of China and Russia, it was clear we were headed back to the kind of Great Power spheres of influence that characterized the 19th century. What was less clear was how all those left out of this equation would fare going forward.

In the most powerful speech delivered at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, this week, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney laid out a forward-looking vision for those who must operate in the breach.

To begin with, he acknowledged that, for all its faults and hypocrisies, the liberal rules-based order did benefit the security and prosperity of smaller powers enough to foster their allegiance. But that is all over. We should not fool ourselves that we are in a moment of “transition” that may someday revert to an approximation of the old normality, he chided. Rather, we are facing a total “rupture” with the past that compels the less powerful to construct an alternative collective approach.

“Middle powers must act together because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu,” he bluntly told the government and business elites assembled in the Alps.

More here.

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What Are 2D Particles?

Elay Shech at Aeon Magazine:

Everything around you – from tables and trees to distant stars and the great diversity of animal and plant life – is built from a small set of elementary particles. According to established scientific theories, these particles fall into two basic and deeply distinct categories: bosons and fermions.

Bosons are sociable. They happily pile into the same quantum state, that is, the same combination of quantum properties such as energy level, like photons do when they form a laser. Fermions, by contrast, are the introverts of the particle world. They flat out refuse to share a quantum state with one another. This reclusive behaviour is what forces electrons to arrange themselves in layered atomic shells, ultimately giving rise to the structure of the periodic table and the rich chemistry it enables.

At least, that’s what we assumed. In recent years, evidence has been accumulating for a third class of particles called ‘anyons’. Their name, coined by the Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek, gestures playfully at their refusal to fit into the standard binary of bosons and fermions – for anyons, anything goes.

more here.

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The Purest Definition of Love

Maria Popova at The Marginalian:

Few things in life cause us more suffering than the confusions of love, all the wrong destinations at which we arrive by following a broken compass, having mistaken myriad things for love: admiration, desire, intellectual affinity, common ground.

This is why knowing whether you actually love somebody can be so difficult, why it requires the rigor of a theorem, the definitional precision of a dictionary, and the courage to weather the depredations of time.

In On the Calculation of Volume (public library) — her startlingly original reckoning with the bewilderments of time and love, partway between Einstein’s Dreams and Ulysses — Danish author Solvej Balle offers the best definition of love I’ve encountered since Iris Murdoch’s half a century ago:

The sudden feeling of sharing something inexplicable, a sense of wonder at the existence of the other — the one person who makes everything simple — a feeling of being calmed down and thrown into turmoil at one and the same time.

more here.

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Why Experts Can’t Agree on Whether AI Has a Mind

Tharin Pillay in Time Magazine:

“I’m not used to getting nasty emails from a holy man,” says Professor Michael Levin, a developmental biologist at Tufts University.

Levin was presenting his research to a group of engineers interested in spiritual matters in India, arguing that properties like “mind” and “intelligence” can be observed even in cellular systems, and that they exist on a spectrum. His audience loved it. But when he pushed further—arguing that the same properties emerge everywhere, including in computers—the reception shifted. “Dumb machines” and “dead matter” could not have these properties, members of his audience insisted. “A lot of people who are otherwise spiritual and compassionate find that idea very disturbing,” he says. Hence, the angry emails.

More here.

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