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Clara Usón at the Paris Review:

Sandra Mozarowsky was never a queen. She was never a king’s girlfriend. She was the king’s lover, though, if you believe the rumors.

As the Franco regime approached its end, its subjects started demanding freedom of expression. Not the whole country, but enough of us to be heard. Our demands for liberty got louder and more insistent, and the regime took them to mean that we wanted to see breasts. We wanted naked women, or half-naked, and so we spent the mid-seventies gaping in awe as our country attained the dubious freedom of a national cinema starring girls who, without fail, opened or removed their tops within seconds of appearing onscreen.

Yes, in Spain, freedom was for breasts. You could spy some liberated bush in a semilegal softcore magazine, too, though never ever a penis. Visible male genitalia would be libertinism, which was anathema. According to the many government ministers and functionaries assigned to disseminate this message, liberty was one thing, libertinism another, and as a nation, it was important for us not to get them confused.

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Zaki Laïdi at Project Syndicate:

One can reproach Viktor Orbán, a friend of US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, for many things. But the Hungarian prime minister is not wrong to point out that we have just witnessed Trump “eating [European Commission President] Ursula von der Leyen for breakfast.” After all, the draft trade agreement the European Union has now concluded with the United States sets a 15% tariff on most European exports to the US, against a 0% tariff on US exports to Europe. Clearly, the match goes to Trump, 15 to nil.

This glaring asymmetry is a far cry from what Europe was demanding – namely, near-zero tariffs on both sides. And making matters worse, the framework also envisions $750 billion in forced purchases of US energy, $600 billion of European investment in the US, and additional orders of US-made military hardware.

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Amber Dance in Knowable Magazine:

The experiment was a striking attempt to investigate weight control. For six weeks, a group of mice gorged on lard-enriched mouse chow, then scientists infected the mice with worms. The worms wriggled beneath the animals’ skin, migrated to blood vessels that surround the intestines, and started laying eggs.

Bruno Guigas, a molecular biologist at the Leiden University Center for Infectious Diseases in the Netherlands, led this study some years back and the results, he says, were “quite spectacular.” The mice lost fat and gained less weight overall than mice not exposed to worms. Within a month or so, he recalls, the scientists barely needed their scale to see that the worm-infested mice were leaner than their worm-free counterparts. Infection with worms, it seems, reversed obesity, the researchers reported in 2015.

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Karl Vick in Time Magazine:

If any place had experience seeing civilians through war, it was the Gaza Strip. It’s much of why the place exists. That stretch of Mediterranean coast was only even named while being demarcated as a refuge for Palestinians driven off their land by Jewish forces in the 1948 war that created Israel. Gaza’s permanent status, like the fate of the Palestinians, was never decided, however. And as the decades churned on, so did the conflict.

There was a devastating rhythm to it. Palestinian militants launched missiles into Israel from Gaza. Israel’s military replied with airstrikes, at times with sustained campaigns dubbed wars. The longest lasted 50 days. In each round of fighting, civilians knew where to find safety: in the schools, clinics, and hospitals run by the U.N., which also fed them.

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Elegy for Jane

—My Student, Thrown by a Horse

I remember the neckcurls, limp and damp as tendrils;
And her quick look, a sidelong pickerel smile;
And how, once startled into talk, the light syllables leaped for her,
And she balanced in the delight of her thought,
A wren, happy, tail into the wind,
Her song trembling the twigs and small branches.
The shade sang with her;
The leaves, their whispers turned to kissing,
And the mold sang in the bleached valleys under the rose.

Oh, when she was sad, she cast herself down into such a pure depth,
Even a father could not find her:
Scraping her cheek against straw;
Stirring the clearest water.
My sparrow, you are not here,
Waiting like a fern, making a spiny shadow.
The sides of wet stones cannot console me,
Nor the moss, wound with the last light.

If only I could nudge you from this sleep,
My maimed darling, my skittery pigeon.
Over this damp grave I speak the words of my love:
I, with no rights in this matter,
Neither father nor lover.

by Theodore Roethke

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Lara Feigel in The Guardian:

When the judges awarded Yael van der Wouden’s brilliant debut, The Safekeep, the Women’s prize for fiction last month, they weren’t just garlanding a book that happens to have a few sexy scenes in it. They were responding to a work that engages with the current levels of literary excitement around sex and marries this with sweeping historical vistas and a distinctive sensibility. It was joined on the shortlist by Miranda July’s exuberant odyssey of midlife desire, All Fours, and Fundamentally by Nussaibah Younis, a smart, quickfire account of a young academic’s work for a UN deradicalisation programme, which juxtaposes the world of Middle Eastern religious politics with a closeup relish for female sexuality.

While younger generations, at least, have said in recent years that they want to see more platonic friendship and less sex on screen, reading appetites appear to be going in the other direction, with a huge boom in romance and “romantasy” – the romance-fantasy hybrid driven by TikTok and the success of authors such as Rebecca Yarros and Sarah J Maas.

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Carol Schaeffer in The Nation:

In 1960, the journalist and social critic Vance Packard identified a trend in American consumer culture: “planned obsolescence.” Either through superficial changes that made the older models appear outdated or through deliberately shortened product lifespans, consumers were encouraged to buy more, which also meant wasting more. It was a sales tactic, Packard found, originally popularized by a 1932 snake-oil salesman turned entrepreneur named Bernard London. London argued that manufacturers should deliberately shorten the lifespan of their products to drive continual consumer demand, boost sales, and keep the industry’s wheels turning. Just a few decades later, Packard argued that planned obsolescence was changing the very character of the American shopper: “We are being trained to live wastefully, with the idea that this is somehow patriotic,” he wrote in his book The Waste Makers.

Packard was perhaps the 20th century’s most prolific Cassandra on the trajectory of American consumerism, a way of life that has touched every corner of the globe and reshaped the world economy. Americans are the world’s foremost buyers, and the rest of the world—until recently—has mostly happily served as willing merchants and manufacturers. This cycle of consumption has created so much trash on the planet that the quantities are almost impossible to comprehend.

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Alberto Alemanno at Project Syndicate:

By agreeing to 15% tariffs on most exports to the United States, the European Union has capitulated to Trump’s zero-sum worldview. In doing so, it has abandoned the principles of multilateralism that have long guided global trade.

The economic consequences are immediate and severe. European exporters now face tariffs nearly ten times higher than the previous trade-weighted average of 1.6%. Volkswagen alone has reported a €1.3 billion ($1.5 billion) hit due to higher US tariffs.

But the tariff rate itself is just part of the problem. The real damage lies in what the EU agreed to pay for the “privilege” of maintaining access to the US market: a commitment to purchase $750 billion worth of American energy over three years and to invest another $600 billion in the US economy.

These staggering sums will inevitably divert resources from European development and innovation while legitimizing bilateral coercion over the multilateral, rules-based World Trade Organization system.

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Dennis Lim at The Current:

For a brief spell in the 1980s, in much of the world but especially in the United Kingdom, the Pet Shop Boys ruled pop music. The synth duo’s singer and lyricist Neil Tennant, once an editor at the magazine Smash Hits, was a keen surveyor of the scene before he became one of its biggest stars, and he would later call this the band’s “imperial phase.” During this halcyon period of critical and commercial invincibility, these improbable pop idols, known for not smiling in publicity photos and for standing stock-still while performing, racked up a string of British number-one singles and many more global hits. Whatever Tennant and keyboardist Chris Lowe attempted—a melodramatic disco stomper about Catholic guilt (“It’s a Sin”), a swaggering reinvention of a morose ballad popularized by Elvis Presley and Wille Nelson (“Always on My Mind”)—it would top the charts.

There was something both incongruous and thrilling about a sensibility as distinct as theirs attaining mainstream success, a sense that they had cracked the code of pop music while remaining outside it. Their hooks were undeniable and universal, their command of dance-music subcultures effortless, and that was hardly the extent of their polyglot fluency.

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Translation

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David Zeitlyn at Aeon Magazine:

Blood from a chicken’s crest was sprinkled over a fire, and its bleeding head was touched against hot stones and a cooking pot. The chicken was then held over the flames and its feathers burnt off before it was cooked with a set of 19 leaves and other ingredients (which must remain secret). Then, as I looked to the east, palm wine mixed with potions was poured into my eyes to ‘open’ them so I could see clearly. And, finally, a portion of the prepared meal was put to one side and later dropped into the hole of a spider (or crab) to ensure that it would continue to tell the truth. This is how, in a Cameroonian village, I was initiated as a spider diviner by the late Wajiri Bi in 1986.

I had travelled to Cameroon as a young anthropologist hoping to study traditional religion and how it connected to local power structures. My research led me to Somié, the smallest of three Mambila villages on the Tikar Plain near the southern border of Nigeria. Somié was settled by the Mambila people, who live between Nigeria and Cameroon in the zone sometimes called the ‘middle belt’: where north meets south in both cultural and ecological terms.

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Andrea Lius in The Scientist:

Some ants within the colony patrol the neighborhood to protect the nest from intruders, while others stay inside to care for the young. Various molecular mechanisms, from hormone and neuropeptide signaling to gene transcription and epigenetics, underlie these behaviors—some of which are highly conserved in evolution.^1,2

…Ant colonies typically consist of queen and worker castes. In some species, such as the carpenter and leafcutter ants, the latter is further divided into multiple subcastes, which scientists can tell apart based on the animals’ size and behavior. Berger’s team previously studied subcaste-specific behavior in carpenter ants, where they found that a hormone called JH3 regulates behavior in the two worker subcastes: Major, the large “soldiers”, and Minor, their smaller counterparts that forage food and nurse the young.⁴ Next, Berger wanted to understand the molecular bases of behavior in a more complex species: the leafcutter ants.

“The leafcutters are the epitome of the most sophisticated ant system,” Berger said.

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Justin Smith-Ruiu at The Hinternet:

I, Justin Smith-Ruiu (ב), born 30071972 and uploaded 18102036, hereby submit to the Council my Petition for immediate and permanent shutdown.

Almost sixty years have passed since I made the transition. Although it was standard for those in my cohort to receive a guarantee of perpetuity, I hope today the Council will agree, upon consideration of this Petition, that enough has changed in the interim to render otiose the original terms of my uploading.

I was, as many members will already know, one of the first volunteers, which is to say I was one of those who got transferred into a digital medium prior to my natural death. Or, perhaps better, I was uploaded at the precise moment of my unnatural death, in a period when the technology was still in its development phase. Perpetuity was supposed to be the reward for volunteering, yet it also turned out, I wish to convince you, to have been the cruelest punishment imaginable.

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Anne-Laure Le Cunff at Big Think:

This is the double-edged sword of dopamine. On one hand, this neurotransmitter might be considered the engine of human achievement. On the other hand, it’s incredibly vulnerable to manipulation by modern technology and instant gratification culture.

But once you understand how your reward system works, you can consciously redirect it toward the things that actually matter to you. Let’s explore the connection between slot machines, social media, and the secret to a more curious, fulfilling life.

Your brain’s reward system is a network of regions that releases dopamine in response to rewarding stimuli. Think of dopamine as your brain’s “want” signal. It doesn’t create pleasure so much as it creates the motivation to seek pleasure.

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Angelo Hernandez Sias at n+1:

The Obscene Bird of Night is a cursed book. Its first translator, already a stand-in, disappeared from the project under mysterious circumstances. Its second translator, tapped to finish the job, never translated another book. Its third translator, some fifty years on, has been asked to revise rather than re-translate, grafting excised segments onto a nearly five-hundred page tome.¹ Its author, who meant to knock it out in a few months, got lost in it for seven years, at the end of which he suffered his third bleeding ulcer, received an infected blood transfusion, had an allergic reaction to morphine, and nearly threw himself from a hospital window. Like that other seven-year endeavor, Ulysses, it has kept the professors busy, but the professors (the North American ones) have not kept it in print. It made Bolaño a lazy critic, it made Knopf the CIA, and it made your humble literary servant think that perhaps he should stick to serving ice cream. I’d have missed out. As the novel’s narrator puts it, “Servants accumulate the privileges of misery.”

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