Jose Maria Valenzuela in Phenomenal World:
At Claudia Sheinbaum’s first State of Affairs speech, the President announced the passage of fourteen new energy sector laws after only eleven months in office. Sheinbaum’s series of reforms mark a new era for state-coordination in the energy sector, a vision that has triggered a wave of criticisms from the business community and beyond.
Take, for example, the opinion of Mexican leading climate expert Dr. Adrián Fernandez, who, at the time of Sheinbaum’s election, told the Washington Post that Sheinbaum’s climate views “are incompatible with her promises to continue many of López Obrador’s energy policies […] like strengthening the national oil and electricity companies.” The comment suggests that ambitious decarbonization efforts are incompatible with an energy sector characterized by dominant state-owned enterprises. It is the latter with which many business leaders are primarily concerned.
Critics of the active state in Mexico allege that market intervention generates underinvestment. Furthermore, they claim that Mexican state-owned enterprises (SOEs) are not adequate to competently navigate new waves of technology. And, in the wider North American context, SOEs are thought to put Mexico’s industry in jeopardy by triggering mechanisms of investment protection.
The suspicion of SOEs—whether in general, or specific to the green transition—is unfounded. Most private investment in renewable energy across the globe has been facilitated by long-term supply contracts from SOEs or central government agencies. Out of all solar and wind energy projects, two-thirds are held by Chinese SOEs (incidentally, China has recently confirmed an impressive target of 3,500 Gigawatts of solar and wind by 2035). And new forms of intervention in the energy sector are welcome by investors searching for low-risk investments with long-term return profiles.
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In talks leading up to the cease-fire deal between Hamas and Israel, President Trump 
When it comes to fat loss, most of us need all the help we can get. With the modern American lifestyle being largely sedentary and characterized by easy access to highly palatable, energy-dense foods, it can be very difficult to maintain the calorie deficit necessary to lose fat and keep it off. Whether or not a calorie deficit is achieved is determined by the difference between total energy in and total energy out. Assessing the “energy in” side of the equation is straightforward—add up the energy content of all food consumed. However, the “energy out” side is more complicated and much more difficult to accurately measure, as it varies by body composition, activity level, age, sex, and various other factors.
Next to an abiding interest in biology, I also have a penchant for the gothic, and a version of the collected works of Edgar Allan Poe naturally can be found in my library. But beyond the author of The Raven, who was Poe? One man who can tell me is Richard Kopley, a Distinguished Professor of English, Emeritus, at the Penn State DuBois campus of Pennsylvania State University. When this biography was published back in March, I made a mental note to revisit it for Halloween. Though my background is in biology, Kopley fortunately wants to provide for a broad readership, including “the general reader, the aficionado, and the scholar”, the goal being to “get as close to Poe as I can for as many readers as I can” (p. 4). Thus, for the last 21 days, I have immersed myself in this detailed and deeply researched biography to read of a life that was both captivating and tragic.
Have you ever asked an AI model what’s on its mind? Or to explain how it came up with its responses? Models will sometimes answer questions like these, but it’s hard to know what to make of their answers. Can AI systems really introspect—that is, can they consider their own thoughts? Or do they just make up plausible-sounding answers when they’re asked to do so?
As Benjamin wrote in 1928, in his sprawling and unfinished magnum opus 
Sitting outside a Catholic church on the French Riviera, Carlo Rovelli jutted his head forward and backward, imitating a pigeon trotting by. Pigeons bob their heads, he told me, not only to stabilize their vision but also to 
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A human cell swarms with trillions of molecules, including some 42 million proteins and a plethora of carbohydrates, lipids, and nucleic acids. Crowded with organelles and other structures, the cell boasts an intricate organization that makes baroque architecture seem plain. Its cytoplasm is a frenzied chemical lab, with molecules continuously reacting, rearranging, and reshaping. In the nucleus, thousands of genes are constantly switching on and off to turn the seeming chaos into concerted actions that help the cell survive and reproduce.
Imagine that you found out that your friend raised his own chickens. One day, he invited you into his house and you saw how he treated them. Dozens of chickens were chained up in a cage too small to move, inhaling the feces of those above them. Those chickens, you learned, had been debeaked, meaning their beak had been sliced off with a hot knife, without anesthetic. This probably felt like having their nose cut off.
Already in 1967, the same year When She Was Good came out, the first samples of Portnoy’s Complaint were issued in wide-circulation magazines like Esquire and Sport, as well as the highbrow Partisan Review. Indeed, it was there, in that mainstay of the New York intelligentsia, that Roth signaled his departure from the magazine’s austere norms with the chapter entitled “Whacking Off.” Solotaroff’s new paperback journal New American Review ran two excerpted chapters of the novel, the first almost two years before the book’s appearance, the second numbering no fewer than twenty-eight thousand words.
The potential for AI to improve weather forecasting and climate modelling (which also takes a long time and uses a lot of energy)