Maria Popova at The Marginalian:

A person is a perpetual ongoingness perpetually mistaking itself for a still point. We call this figment personality or identity or self, and yet we are constantly making and remaking ourselves. Composing a life as the pages of time keep turning is the great creative act we are here for. Like evolution, like Leaves of Grass, it is the work of continual revision, not toward greater perfection but toward greater authenticity, which is at bottom the adaptation of the self to the soul and the soul to the world.

In one of the essays found in his exquisite 1877 collection Birds and Poets (public library | public domain), the philosopher-naturalist John Burroughs (April 3, 1837–March 29, 1921) explores the nature of that creative act through a parallel between poetry and personhood anchored in a brilliant metaphor for the two different approaches to creation. He writes:

There are in nature two types or forms, the cell and the crystal. One means the organic, the other inorganic; one means growth, development, life; the other means reaction, solidification, rest. The hint and model of all creative works is the cell; critical, reflective, and philosophical works are nearer akin to the crystal; while there is much good literature that is neither the one nor the other distinctively, but which in a measure touches and includes both.

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Gemma Conroy in Nature:

The cellular batteries known as mitochondria sometimes dump DNA into their surroundings, which can contribute to inflammation during ageing. Now a study in mice reveals why this dumping occurs: mitochondria are expelling ‘tainted’ DNA¹. Scientists found that, in the cells of ageing mice with kidney inflammation, strands of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) contained an excess of certain types of nucleotides — molecular building blocks — that can harm DNA. This excess prompted the mitochondria to eject the abnormal fragments of genetic code into the cytosol, a fluid that fills the cell, in which the free-roaming mtDNA kick-started key inflammatory pathways associated with ageing.

The study is exciting because it helps to explain why and how mitochondria throw away their DNA, says Timothy Shutt, a medical geneticist at the University of Calgary in Canada, who focuses on mitochondria. This insight could help researchers to better understand mitochondria’s contribution to inflammageing — the chronic inflammation that occurs as people get older, adds Shutt.

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Zhang Yueran at the Paris Review:

“Little Reunions ought to be burned,” Eileen Chang wrote to her friend and literary executor, Stephen Soong, in 1976, the year she finished what would be her last novel. When it was finally published, in 2009, fourteen years after her death, Little Reunions seemed to carry this curse with it; the book received widespread criticism for its cryptic narrative and for not sounding like Eileen Chang.

At the time she was writing Little Reunions, Chang had been living in Los Angeles for two decades. She was born in Shanghai in 1920, to an aristocratic family in decline; shortly after her birth, her father grew addicted to opium and her mother emigrated to Britain. Chang harbored literary ambitions from a young age, and studied English while attending an all-girls Christian school in Shanghai. At the age of twenty-four, she published the short story collection Chuanqi (Romances), whose astonishing assuredness and glamorous portrayal of Shanghai’s cosmopolitan milieu quickly made her the most prominent female author in China of her time.

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Geoff Shullenberger in The Point:

In February of 1972, Michel Foucault sat down with a group of young Maoist militants to discuss the subject of “popular justice.” The occasion for the dialogue was an ongoing effort by some on the radical French left to convene “popular tribunals” that would put the ruling class and its representatives on trial for crimes against the people that went unprosecuted. In 1970, Jean-Paul Sartre himself had presided over one such tribunal in the town of Lens, where the owners of a mine were symbolically tried in absentia for the death of sixteen workers.

Left-wing terrorism was on the rise in Europe, and the arguments for “people’s justice” then in vogue had started to alarm some in the militant milieu. The prospect that the same logic might be used to justify the tactics embraced by groups like the Baader-Meinhof gang and the Italian Red Brigades hovered in the background of the dialogue with Foucault. The most radical subset of Maoists was led by Benny Lévy, who then went by the nom de guerre Pierre Victor. A firebrand leader of the 1968 revolt who later became Sartre’s personal secretary, Lévy was perhaps the most fervent advocate of violent direct action in the group. Some of his increasingly uneasy compatriots, such as André Glucksmann, seemed to regard the dialogue with Foucault as an opportunity to scrutinize the arguments being marshaled to justify such tactics. This proved to be the case, but not quite in the way they expected.

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Shiri Pasternak in Boston Review:

I learned my name was on the list from a Jewish colleague at my university, a woman I hardly know. “I need to tell you something,” she wrote in an email to me. “Do you have a minute for a call today?” A local Facebook group with 47,000 followers, I learned, had posted a list of “Self Hating Jews that are seeking the destruction of our community.” They called it the “kapo list,” a term for Nazi collaborators in the concentration camps that, as of late, has been repurposed to censure Jewish critics of Israel. A few weeks later, I was on a new list: “[trash can icon] Jews.” It was populated with the names of Jewish people who had deputed at the local school board on a report that conflated antisemitism with anti-Zionism. The lister bragged that they had reported us to the Israeli Embassy. This time, several people awkwardly reached out to me: “I saw the list.” It must have gotten around.

The lists I was put on were aimed at anti-Zionist Jews, seeking to police the internal party line by defining them as traitors for speaking out on Israel. But they are long predated by other lists—namely, lists of Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims that target the right to tell their histories, organize, and share analysis of Palestine. And though these lists vary in their targets and tactics, they all share a common end: to intimidate the movement for Palestinian rights into silence by denigrating its advocates to the point where their livelihoods and mobility are threatened.

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Patrick Iber interviews Adam Przeworski in Dissent:

Patrick Iber: Over the course of your career, you have studied how democracies fall apart and get put back together. Classically, these events happen in sequence: first a coup, then a dictatorship, then a democratic restoration. But reading your daily reactions to what’s happening in the United States, the current situation doesn’t seem so clear cut. What makes it challenging to fit what is happening today into frameworks used to study previous democratic failures?

Adam Przeworski: Until about twenty-five years ago, breakdowns of democratic regimes were discrete events to which one could attach specific dates. The Weimar Republic fell when Hitler assumed dictatorial powers on March 23, 1933; Chilean democracy was overthrown by a military coup on September 11, 1973. Such events have declined dramatically in frequency in the twenty-first century. We have witnessed several governments maintain the trappings of democracy while taking incremental steps to ensure that they remain in office and remove institutional barriers to the discretion of the executive. The common label for such steps is backsliding, or sometimes deconsolidation, erosion, or retrogression. As this process advances, the opposition becomes unable to win elections or assume office if it wins, established institutions lose the capacity to restrain the executive, and popular protest is repressed by force.

This phenomenon took political scientists by surprise. Many of us thought that if a government were to conspicuously violate the constitution or cross another red line, citizens would coordinate against it, and, anticipating this reaction, the government would not commit such a violation. Other political scientists argued that the same would occur if a government were to refuse to hold an election or commit flagrant election fraud. A combination of separation of powers and popular reaction would make democratic institutions impregnable to the “encroaching spirit of power,” in James Madison’s phrase—that is, the desire of politicians for enduring and unlimited power. That was what we thought.

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Erin Douglas in The Christian Science Monitor:

In “Super Natural,” award-winning science writer Alex Riley casts his inquisitive, generous gaze upon the extremists. No, not the far right or the far left; these are the far-deep, far-up, and far-flung life-forms that inhabit Earth’s less move-in-ready biomes. From snailfish and wood frogs to painted turtles and tardigrades, these remarkable creatures display a knack for thriving – or at least carrying on – in a niche of their own. Mr. Riley chatted via video with Monitor contributor Erin Douglass about the marvels and possibilities of such lives on the edge. The interview has been edited and condensed.

You describe finding solace in nature as a boy growing up in the 1990s. Do you have an early memory that stands out?

I grew up in North Yorkshire, so northern England. It was very rural, very picturesque, but very lonely as well. You had to find your own interests.

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Claire Evans in Quanta Magazine:

In 1983, the octogenarian geneticist Barbara McClintock stood at the lectern of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. She was famously publicity averse — nearly a hermit — but it’s customary for people to speak when they’re awarded a Nobel Prize, so she delivered a halting account of the experiments that had led to her discovery, in the early 1950s, of how DNA sequences can relocate across the genome. Near the end of the speech, blinking through wire-framed glasses, she changed the subject, asking: “What does a cell know of itself?”

McClintock had a reputation for eccentricity. Still, her question seemed more likely to come from a philosopher than a plant geneticist. She went on to describe lab experiments in which she had seen plant cells respond in a “thoughtful manner.” Faced with unexpected stress, they seemed to adjust in ways that were “beyond our present ability to fathom.” What does a cell know of itself? It would be the work of future biologists, she said, to find out.

Forty years later, McClintock’s question hasn’t lost its potency.

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From Time Magazine:

The next time you get a blood test, X-ray, mammogram, or colonoscopy, there’s a good chance an artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm will first interpret the results even before your doctor has seen it.

Over the course of just a few years, AI has spread rapidly into hospitals and clinics around the world. More than 1,000 health-related AI tools have been authorized for use by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and more than 2 in 3 physicians say they use AI to some degree, according to a recent survey by the American Medical Association. The potential is extraordinary. AI—particularly in the form of AI agents that can reason, adapt, and act on their own—can lighten doctors’ workloads by drafting patient notes and chart summaries, support precision medicine through more targeted therapies, and flag subtle abnormalities in scans and slides that a human eye might miss. It can speed discovery of drugs and drug targets through new processes, such as AI-driven protein structure prediction and design that led to last year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry. AI can give patients faster, more personalized support by scheduling appointments, answering questions, and flagging side effects. It can help match candidates to clinical trials and monitor health data in real time, alerting clinicians and patients early to prevent complications and improve outcomes.

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Sean Carroll at Preposterous Universe:

Getting along in society requires that we mostly adhere to certainly shared norms and customs. Often it’s not enough that we all know what the rules are, but also that everyone else knows the rules, and that they know that we know the rules, and so on. Philosophers and game theorists refer to this as common knowledge. In Steven Pinker’s new book, When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows…, he explores how common knowledge (or its absence) explains money, power, and a wide variety of subtextual human interactions.

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Gavriel Kleinwaks & Karam Elabd at Works in Progress:

After epidemiologists linked typhoid outbreaks to water cleanliness, cities began building large-scale sand filtration systems in the 1890s, and in 1908, Jersey City pioneered the first continuous chlorination of a public water supply. By the 1920s, typhoid deaths had fallen by two-thirds, and waterborne diseases were in retreat across the country.

While typhoid and other waterborne diseases triggered vast engineering and regulatory responses, the equivalent airborne threats have not. Tuberculosis alone kills more than a million people every year around the world, yet the air in schools, clinics, and public buildings remains largely unfiltered and unmonitored. Covid-19, which killed over seven million people, demonstrated how rapidly airborne pathogens can spread in poorly ventilated spaces.

Just as filtration and chlorination made drinking water safe at scale, we now have the tools to do the same for indoor air: ventilation, high-quality filters, and germicidal light.

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Paul Collier at Project Syndicate:

The world needs a new economics for neglected places – for those who have fallen behind others in the same country, whether it be a rich one or a poor one. The place in question might be a community, a town, or a region: Muslims in France, Rotherham in Northern England, or Colombia’s Atlantic-Caribbean coastal region.

In my last book, Left Behind, I show why such places, once hit by an adverse shock, spiral down unless the shock is mitigated by supportive and timely finance guided by local contextual knowledge. Those in the United Kingdom may recognize this as a critique of the highly centralized, short-horizon, economic micromanagement exemplified by the Treasury; but the consequences should serve as a warning to other countries, too. Through detailed analyses of instances of renewal, I hope to show how both local leadership and bottom-up social movements can be effective in transforming broken places.

The problem, contrary to what Milton Friedman argued (and what the UK’s Treasury assumes), is that financial markets reallocate capital from shock-hit places to those that are unaffected. The smartest money flees from adversity toward success, and it is soon followed by other investors.

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Paul Leslie at Salmagundi:

This past summer, I was surprised to encounter a face I knew in two most unexpected places. The first was in a photo montage accompanying an article written by Josh Kovensky of Talking Points Memo in the wake of J.D. Vance becoming the Vice Presidential nominee, entitled “A Journey Through the Authoritarian Right.” Arranged in the collage among images of a ripped man with lasers shooting from his eyes, of anti-democracy blogger Curtis Yarvin, and of Peter Thiel rubbing Benjamins between his thumb and forefinger, was my former professor and friend from Stanford University, René Girard. I was in France at the time; mere hours after reading Kovensky’s piece, I saw through the window of a taxi René’s face again—this time in the form of a larger-than-life decal on a light rail car in Avignon, where as it happens he is one of a dozen local heroes permanently celebrated on the new transit system. What do the medieval, culturally-rich, Provençal city of Avignon and the American authoritarian right have in common? Both claim a bond with this influential philosopher and member of L’Académie Française, who died in 2015. Only one of the claims is legitimate. The misappropriation of Girard’s ideas by the American right is not just a matter of academic concern; it has significant implications for our political discourse and society.

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Sophie McBain in The Guardian:

Not long after the novelist Kiran Desai published her second book, The Inheritance of Loss, which won the Booker prize in 2006, she began working on her third. The title, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, came to her quickly, and she knew she wanted to write a “modern-day romance that wasn’t necessarily romantic”, one as much concerned with the forces that keep us apart – class, race, nationality, family history – as those that bind us. Writing the book itself took almost two decades.

One problem with devoting so many years to one book is that people worry for your welfare, Desai says with a laugh. “People begin to wonder what’s wrong. Are you really working on something?” One neighbour – who observed how Desai would rise early each morning to write, eat her breakfast and lunch at her desk, take a short break to do her food shop or housework and then write until as late as she could manage in the evenings – attempted an intervention. “You need to come out of your house,” he told her. “You will go crazy writing a book! This is no way to live!” Her 90-year-old uncle observed, with affection, that she was starting to look “like a kind of derelict”, which she acknowledges was true. “It was becoming absurd!” And yet Desai says she loved living this way, in complete service to her writing.

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Anirban Mukhopadhyay in The Scientist:

Pregnancy has long been framed as an evolutionary tug-of-war. The fetus presses for resources, while the mother mounts defenses to limit invasive placentation. A new study in PNAS challenges that view, reframing placental implantation as “coopetition,” a game-theory term for simultaneous competition and cooperation in the hope of mutually beneficial results.¹ The shift could explain why some pregnancies succeed or fail, offering clues to disorders like preeclampsia.

“It started out as a random observation—when we grew maternal cells together with fetal cells, the maternal cells seemed to partially lose their pregnancy-prepared state,” said Yale University evolutionary biologist Günter Wagner, the co-corresponding author of the study. His collaborator Kshitiz at the University of Connecticut added, “The fetal trophoblasts had reversed the changes acquired by maternal cells in anticipation of pregnancy.”

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