And start to die together.
by Donald Hall
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Raquel Loga in ie University:
Artificial intelligence (AI) has become an integral part of daily life, streamlining everything from search queries to complex decision-making. While AI tools offer convenience and efficiency, they also raise concerns about cognitive offloading—the process of delegating cognitive tasks to external aids. As reliance on AI grows, experts warn that it could diminish critical-thinking skills and alter fundamental cognitive processes. It is not about avoiding its use entirely; the incorporation of AI is essential for the advancement of our societies. (In fact, as will be seen later, it has been shown that a moderate use of AI can have a positive cognitive impact.) However, it is advisable to learn how to use it properly and in a balanced manner. These concerns were central to discussions at the AI for Humanity: Innovating for a Sustainable Digital Future session, led by Iliana Grosse-Buening, during the second edition of the Responsible Tech Salon. This event was co-organized by the IE Center for Health and Well-being, led by Lisa Bevill, and the UNESCO Chair in AI Ethics and Governance at IE School of Humanities, led by Ted Lechterman.
AI tools, from smart assistants to predictive algorithms, have transformed how people process information. The ease of accessing instant solutions has led to cognitive offloading, where individuals shift memory and problem-solving tasks to technology (Nosta, 2025).
More here.
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Chris Klimek in The Washington Post:
Setting a template that Parker and Stone would follow, Judge spun a couple of experimental animated shorts into a spiky comedy series that seemed, by the more decorous standards of the era, bracing in its vulgarity — and sometimes, trenchant in its commentary. By the time “South Park” came along, Judge had already created a second, more ambitious animated series, the sitcom “King of the Hill,” a send-up of life in a fictional suburb of the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex. Judge voiced the title role of propane salesman Hank Hill, giving the character and the series a tenor that was always more affectionate than mocking. The show’s initial 13-season run concluded in 2009. After a 15-year hiatus, the show’s 14th season premiered on Hulu this month.
More here.
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Inori Roy in The Local:
If you’re in the market for fishing bait anywhere in North America, and now even in parts of western Europe, odds are you’re buying a Canadian nightcrawler plucked from this stretch of land between Toronto and Windsor. These wild Canadian worms, who live so far beneath the surface of the soil that breeding or farming them is impractical, are hand-picked by a small army of workers, almost all immigrants from Southeast Asia, including generations of Vietnamese refugees and, more recently, temporary foreign workers from Thailand and Laos. It’s a niche sector of the western economy that’s exclusively sourced from this small corner of the province, and run primarily by family businesses passed from one generation to the next. In a given year, the more than $200 million industry sells between 500 and 700 million worms. But with changing demand, immigration labour policies, and the climate crisis, it’s also at an existential crossroads.
More here.
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Ella Kellner in The Conversation:
As a materials scientist who studies spiders and their silks, I am curious about the relationship between spiderweb architecture and the strength of the silks spiders use. How do the design of a web and the properties of the silk used affect a spider’s ability to catch its next meal?
Spider silk has a long evolutionary history. Researchers believe that it first evolved around 400 million years ago. These ancestral spiders used silk to line their burrows, protect their vulnerable eggs and create sensory paths and guidelines as they navigated their environment.
To understand what ancient spiderwebs could have looked like, scientists look to the lampshade spider. This spider lives in rock outcroppings in the Appalachian and Rocky mountains. It is a living relative of some of the most ancient spiders to ever make webs, and it hasn’t changed much at all since web-building first evolved.
More here.
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Jennifer Zacharia in the Boston Review:
In a recent series of videos, Avichay Adraee, the Arabic-language spokesperson for the Israeli military, relentlessly attacked Anas al-Sharif, an Al Jazeera correspondent in northern Gaza. On July 20, while reporting on a particularly harrowing scene from the courtyard of al-Shifa Hospital, al-Sharif broke down emotionally when an emaciated woman collapsed from hunger beside him, as an ambulance arrived carrying some of the dozens of people killed by Israeli soldiers that day while waiting for bags of flour. Adraee accused him of shedding “crocodile tears.” When al-Sharif called for a ceasefire, Adraee called him a “mouthpiece of intellectual terrorism.”
To nearly all who watched him, al-Sharif’s reporting has been nothing short of heroic and awe-inspiring. But to the Israeli government, he is culpable for having the audacity to document the starvation campaign it has engineered and imposed by brute force.
More here.
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Joseph Lawler at the New Atlantis:
Americans are living ever more isolated lives. We get married later, start families later, have fewer children, and report more loneliness than ever before. Everyone suspects that new technology has something to do with this. But what if we’re also suffering from the failure of a very old technology?
Somehow it has become astonishingly expensive to buy a house in the United States. The median house sale price is now $417,000. Fifty years ago, in today’s dollars, it was $232,000. And the young are getting priced out: In 1981, the median first-time homebuyer was 29 years old. Today he or she is 38.
In this new essay series, originally reported by Joseph Lawler, we will explore how the U.S. housing market suffers from a series of distortions created by misguided government policies.
The series will address why we keep building single-family-housing suburbs when most people report that they would prefer to live in lively neighborhoods with retail, churches, restaurants, cafes, and other third spaces.
more here.
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Cathy Mason at Aeon Magazine:
To see how Murdoch ends up thinking that love is central to morality, it is first worth asking a broader question: what is morality? Murdoch’s answer is that at the core of our moral life is the way we see the world, our ‘vision’ of it. We are always looking at something, in some manner, and in doing so we either build up a fairer, more just, more adequate picture of it, or we distort our vision of it. This is a continuous part of our lives.
Our vision, she thinks, largely determines how we go on to act: if I see you as my enemy, there will be no surprise when I start treating you like my enemy. If I had instead seen you as a potential friend, then I would naturally treat you with warmth and care. Acting rightly matters, she thinks, but how we act depends on how we see, principally on how we see other people.
Correspondingly, she sees the key moral activity not as choice but as attention – an idea she gets from the activist, mystic and philosopher Simone Weil. On Murdoch’s picture, our most basic moral activities are activities of attending to particular things in particular ways, since this is the activity that shapes our vision of the world.
more here.
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Brooke Allen in The Hudson Review:
The last time I wrote about James Baldwin, in the late 1990s, I concluded that his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, was his best, and that his second, Giovanni’s Room, was sentimental, artificial, and populated by stock figures—in fact I agreed with Norman Mailer’s assessment that the novel, dealing openly in Eisenhower’s America with homosexuality, was “brave” but “bad.” Now hailed as a seminal work, it had been turned down by Knopf, who had published Go Tell It on the Mountain. (The novel was eventually published by Dial.) Baldwin assumed that Knopf had expected him to take up the mantle of “Negro writer” and stick to racial subjects, which Giovanni’s Room did not address; or perhaps they had been made nervous by the gay content. But Henry Carlisle, the editor who ruled against it, was not an unworldly man, and I think one can take at face value his objection that the book lacked credible characters and would not enhance the author’s reputation.
More here.
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Mark Chiusano in Time Magazine:
It’s not easy to move around New York City as Zohran Mamdani anymore.
Like when the 33-year-old Democratic nominee for mayor leaves a union meeting to walk to his Manhattan campaign office, as he did one Monday morning in July. Within a block, a phone–wielding crowd forms and follows. “Oh my God, hello,” someone blurts. People clap. Cars honk. Traffic down Fifth Avenue comes to a standstill as a plumber’s van stops and a guy hops out to shake Mamdani’s hand. There is some heckling. “Antisemitic!” someone shouts. But mostly it is star treatment, in multiple languages and from all generations.
All this is new: the adulation, the notoriety, the xenophobic death threats that have prompted an entourage of men with spaghetti earpieces. Before 2025, basically no one knew who Mamdani was. Over the course of eight months, the democratic socialist and backbench state assemblyman went from local long shot to likely mayor of America’s biggest city. Suddenly he is a main character in national politics—the ubiquitous subject of cable news segments, a lightning rod on the left and right. Senior Democrats have weighed in for and against him. President Donald Trump has pioneered a dark new birtherism by questioning his immigration status and floating his possible arrest. (Mamdani, who would be the city’s first South Asian and Muslim mayor, was born in Uganda and became a U.S. citizen in 2018.) To many progressives, his style of politics—principled, pocketbook-focused, and online—was an electrifying answer for a moribund party.
More here.
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Dear child of the near future,
here is what I know—hawks
soar on the updraft and sparrows always
return to the seed source until they spot
the circling hawk. Then they disappear
for days and return, a full flock,
ready. I think we all have the power
to do what we must to survive.
One day, I hope to set a table, invite you
to draw up a chair. Greens steaming garlic.
Slices of bread, still warm. Honey flecked with wax,
and a pitcher of clear water. Sustenance for acts
of survival, for incantations
stirring across our tongues. Can we climb
out of this greedy mouth,
disappear, and then return in force?
My stars are tucked in my pocket,
ready for battle. If we flood
the streets with salt water, we can
flood the sky with wings.
By Tamiko Beyer
from Split This Rock
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Lawrence Weschler at Wondercabinet:
Three months after the 1929 Hebron massacre {which saw the deaths of nearly 70 Jews and scores of others maimed or wounded}, the celebrated historian Hans Kohn – active in the Zionist movement since 1909 – wrote the following letter: “I feel that I can no longer remain a leading official within the Zionist Organization… We pretend to be innocent victims. Of course, the Arabs attacked us this past August. Since they have no armies, they could not obey the rules of war. They perpetrated all the barbaric acts that are characteristic of a colonial revolt. But we are obliged to look into the deeper cause of this revolt. We have been in Palestine for twelve years [since the start of the British occupation] without having even once made a serious attempt at seeking through negotiations the consent of the indigenous people. We have been relying exclusively upon Great Britain’s military might. We have set ourselves goals which by their very nature had to lead to conflict with Arabs… for twelve years we pretended that the Arabs did not exist and were glad when we were not reminded of their existence.” (Jewish National and University Library 376/224, Kohn to Berthold Feiwel [1875–1937]. Jerusalem, 21 Nov. 1929).
more here.
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Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian:
Samuel Pepys’s diary, which covers 1660 to 1669, is regarded as one of the great classic texts in the English language. Words spill out of Pepys – 1.25m of them – as he bustles around London, building a successful career as a naval administrator while navigating the double trauma of the plague and the Great Fire of London. Historians have long gone to the diary for details of middle-class life during the mid‑17th century: the seamy streets, the watermen, the taverns and, as Pepys moves up the greasy pole, the court and the king. Best of all is his eye for the picturesque detail: the way, for instance, on the morning of 4 September 1666, as fire licks around his house, Pepys buries a choice parmesan cheese in the garden with the intention of keeping it safe.
Not all of the diary is in English, though. Quite a lot of it is in French (or rather Franglais), Latin, Spanish and a curious mashup of all three. Pepys increasingly resorted to this home-brewed polyglot whenever the subject of sex came up, which was often.
More here.
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Hannah Gold at The Nation:
You know you’re in a Cynthia Ozick short story when the wind is merciless and the leaves have dropped. It may already be snowing. In “Bloodshed,” we are greeted by the “icy scenes” that a gun-toting rationalist sees from a Greyhound bus on his way to a “town of the hasidim” outside New York City, where he is ultimately shamed and disarmed by a local rebbe. In “The Biographer’s Hat,” snowflakes adorn the fur collar of a crooked biographer who mouches off a proofreader and persuades her to falsely insert herself into his subject’s history. “A Mercenary” concludes with the haunting vision of a man lying dead “under the stone-white hanging stars of Poland…. Against the stones and under the snow.”
These stories conjure a world that is cold and forbidding. What was once full of fresh promise is now buried. This isn’t to say that Ozick isn’t capable of depicting a fairer climate every now and then—but it will be in Fascist Italy, and a critic, fast approaching middle age, will be made to look catastrophically foolish on every page, as in “At Fumicaro.”
more here.
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R.B. Griggs at Tech For Life:
It would be easy to insist that LLMs are just objects, obviously. As an engineer I get it—it doesn’t matter how convincing the human affectations are, underneath the conversational interface is still nothing but data, algorithms, and matrix multiplication. Any projection of subject-hood is clearly just anthropomorphic nonsense. Stochastic parrots!
But even if I grant you that, can we admit that LLMs are perhaps the strangest object that has ever existed? It is an object that relentlessly trains on the language output of all human subjects until every semantic association has been harvested from the syntax. The result is an interface where any possible persona, both real and imagined, is just a prompt away.
If it is an object, then it is one that has mastered the subject so completely that we eagerly dream up entirely new intersubjective realities to explore with it. We want every child to experience personalized tutoring with chatbot teachers. We simulate historical figures, create AI therapists, and even, with the right fine-tuning, chat with dead relatives. LLMs are becoming a general purpose tool for filling any subject-sized hole in our very human lives, for both good and ill.
You can’t help but sense that chatbots are starting to fill a strange new ontological space. A chatbot is not fully a subject, nor merely an object. But what?
More here.
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Frieda Klotz in Undark Magazine:
The stomach pains had persisted for a couple of months when Yann Bizien, a business developer in the software industry who was 35 at the time, finally ended up in the emergency room at a hospital in Versailles, France. He had already seen his family doctor who prescribed antacid medication. But the true diagnosis, when it came, was devastating: Pancreatic cancer, which had spread to his liver. Bizien, a married father of a young child who exercised regularly and did not smoke, realized that if the disease followed its normal course, he would have just months to live.
That was in 2017. Bizien embarked on the standard treatment for pancreatic cancer — a grueling regimen of chemotherapy over a six-month period. He responded extremely well. “I was like, in a warrior mode. Like, ‘Okay, I’m going to go for the treatments,’” he told Undark, speaking from his home outside Paris. “And even if I have one chance, I take my chance.”
More here.
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Call it “A Tale of Two Satirists.”