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Julia Friedman at The Hedgehog Review:

Published by Hunters Point Press last year, the writings collected in Is Art History? cover seven decades of Alpers’s prolific professional life. Arranged chronologically, from a long scholarly article first published in 1960 to a book review that came out in 2023, the compilation offers a long-distance view of a storied career. The book is clearly a labor of love. It is hefty, at 420 pages of text plus color plates, complete with a red cloth cover with embossed gold lettering and a silky gray ribbon bookmark. The margins are extra wide (a rarity today). In addition to the color plates compiled at the end of the volume, there are black-and-white illustrations in the margins, for quick reference. This is one of many nods to the classic art history texts of yore. The foreword is by Barney Kulok, a young photographer who collaborated with Alpers, and the introduction is by her former student, now professor of art history at Stanford University, Richard Meyer. The absence of contributions by her colleagues, friends, or coauthors (who included the likes of John Berger, Michael Podro, Richard Wollheim, and Michael Baxandall), is a sad reminder that, as Alpers remarks: “Everyone I would have written for is dead.”

more here.

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Vinson Cunningham at The New Yorker:

You could say all of this in another way: Theo Huxtable was a nicely realized character but also a lofty ideal. What he meant was too much for any real person to carry around. Malcolm-Jamal Warner seemed miraculously able to pull it off. He’d been famous and highly visible at an alarmingly young age, but, unlike many other former child stars, he never seemed to feel much rancor about the experience, or resentment about lugging pure-minded Theo around with him for the rest of his life.

When he played roles in shows like “Suits,” “The Resident,” and “Malcolm and Eddie,” you couldn’t help but think about Theo. But that wasn’t a bad thing: it only meant that the archetype that the earlier character had prodded into being was now commonplace in all kinds of representations of reality—that Theo had done the impossibly difficult cultural work of affixing a face upon a new, then suddenly ubiquitous, kind of person.

Warner helped this process along by always comporting himself with an ambassadorial cheer. He knew what he meant. One of “The Cosby Show” ’s unspoken assertions—now much more controversial than in the eighties, when the show premièred—was that polished personal presentation was part of a Black man’s arsenal of tools to survive an unpredictable world.

more here.

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Dan Samorodnitsky in Quanta:

When the sun shines on your skin, what does it hit? When it causes a burn, what went wrong?

Underneath that pain is your cells’ emergency response to DNA damage. When a hazard, such as ultraviolet light, ionizing radiation or certain chemicals, damages DNA, the cell needs to respond at breakneck speed. Ideally it either repairs the damage to its genomic information repository, or else sacrifices itself through a controlled cell death process. If it doesn’t move fast enough, it risks the more dangerous outcome of death by necrosis — an explosive, uncontrolled death that damages its neighbors — or passing mutated DNA to its descendants, which could develop into cancer.

More here.

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Alpita Kulkarni in The Scientist:

Most biology labs today—particularly smaller or early-career groups and those outside major funding hubs—face a tough reality: shrinking budgets, rising costs, limited access to cutting-edge technologies, and mounting pressures to publish. The challenge isn’t just keeping pace with innovation—it’s staying in the game at all. In this climate, simulation-first approaches are a powerful equalizer. By allowing scientists to test biological hypotheses computationally before committing to costly experiments, these tools enable smart science even on a tight budget.

Constraint often drives creativity. One strategy gaining momentum is AI-guided predictive modeling, which relies on data-driven tools that simulate biological behavior to unlock new insights. Built using advanced techniques like generative modeling (which simulates how a cell might respond to genetic or environmental changes) and probabilistic inference (which estimates the likelihood of different outcomes), these models are reshaping how we interpret complex data.

More here.

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Colin Powers in Phenomenal World:

Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman first announced Saudi Vision 2030 (SV2030), an economic diversification-cum-social reform plan, during an interview with Al Arabiya in April 2016. SV2030 vowed to transform Saudi Arabia, proposing fantastical ventures into the future while aggressively deploying capital abroad and opening the domestic economy up via debt issuance, investment code reform, contracting, and capital market reform. Knock-on effects for the world economy were imminent.

Facing volatility in the commodities market and growing financial vulnerabilities, the oil-dependent nation has since embarked on an effort to remake itself as a global economic powerhouse. Alongside ever expanding flows of crude to the east and deepening investment ties with China, Saudi Arabia’s moves on the home front looked primed to tilt the axis of global capital accumulation. The nine years since SV2030’s announcement have seen gains across a number of domains. The country has already cleared original targets for female labor-force participation and tourism. It is also likely to meet its goals in the capital markets. Courtesy of Aramco’s limited IPO, the Saudi Exchange now ranks as the ninth largest stock market in the world by market capitalization and the third largest among emerging markets.

SV2030 has also prompted an enormous wave of construction in its bid to reshape the country’s built environment. Despite its population of just 30 million, Saudi Arabia is poised to host the largest construction market in the world by 2028. Neom—the Giga Project being conjured out in the western province of Tabuk along the northern shores of the Red Sea—is alone absorbing 20 percent of the global steel supply. The plan’s housing program aims to achieve 70 percent Saudi national home ownership in 2030; as of 2024, official statistics estimate ownership in the range of 62–65 percent, up from 47 percent in 2016.  Most importantly as pertains to SV2030’s overarching goals, the non-oil economy has expanded at a greater pace than the oil economy in recent years.

More here.

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Adam Tooze in Chartbook:

For many months, it has been beyond reasonable doubt that the Israeli government, the Israeli military, sections of Israeli politics and society as well as their aiders and abetters abroad, have been deliberately starving the population of Gaza with a view to forcing the population either to flee or to face intensifying misery and ultimately an agonizing death. There is clear evidence of deliberate intent going back to 2023. This clearly warrants charges of genocide.

Those who style themselves “defenders of Israel” will be quick to insist that, in fact, there is a feeding operation in Gaza. But, as the famine historian and aid expert Alex de Waal demonstrates in powerful piece in the Guardian, “Israel’s food points are not just death traps – they’re an alibi … The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation system is like standing at the edge of a big pond and feeding the (starving) fish by throwing breadcrumbs. Who gets to eat its rations?” Air drops of food, are simply more of the same.

Ethnic cleansing by means of starvation is the actual policy.

Anyone interested in the history of famine as a political weapon would do well to consult de Waal’s harrowing history on the the topic.

As he shows, deliberate starvation, which was at the heart of Raphael Lemkin’s original discussion of genocide, born out of the Nazi occupation of Poland in the 1940s, was subsequently marginalized in our understanding of 20th-century horror.

More here.

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Paul Krugman in his newsletter:

Everyone loves enshittification. Not the thing itself, of course. But Cory Doctorow’s neologism was an instant hit, neatly encapsulating the public’s growing disappointment, sometimes bordering on rage, with what was happening to internet platforms. His pithy summary of the process was also brilliant:

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

I argued earlier this week that enshittification has a lot to do with the way the tech industry has fallen out of public favor:

Source: Gallup

And the increasingly anti-democratic rage of tech bros is, I’d argue, in part driven by their awareness that people don’t love and admire them the way they used to, and their belief that they should still be the culture heroes they once were.

But without detracting from the brilliance of Doctorow’s discussion, I’ve become convinced that his analysis is too narrow, focusing only on certain kinds of social platforms. In fact, the basic logic of enshittification — in which businesses start out being very good to their customers, then switch to ruthless exploitation — applies to any business characterized by network effects.

More here.

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Lydialyle Gibson in Harvard Magazine:

In the weeks and months after Donald Trump’s second inauguration, the number “3.5 percent” kept showing up—like a mantra, or maybe a prayer—in different corners of the internet. It was repeated in social media posts, long Reddit threads, online newsletters, political podcasts, videos, and the websites of activist organizations. “The Hopeful Math for Saving Democracy,” proclaimed a headline in Ms. Magazine. In his newsletter, independent journalist Dan Froomkin asked, “Is there a magic number for the resistance?”—and answered with that familiar figure.

A decade ago, academic research found that authoritarian governments around the world have almost always been forced to yield when mass-resistance campaigns manage to mobilize 3.5 percent of a country’s population during a “peak” event. In the activist community, one organizer told me, it’s become “kind of a golden rule.”

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Angela Haupt in Time Magazine:

When Katie Thurston was diagnosed with Stage IV metastatic breast cancer earlier this year, at age 34, people kept telling her they knew someone with the same diagnosis. Solidarity, you might think. A helpful way to relate. Not exactly: Their friend or family member had died. This scenario is “pretty recurring,” says Thurston, who starred on season 17 of The Bachelorette, and while people have good intentions—they want you to know they have experience with what you’re going through—the remark doesn’t land well. “We understand that death is a possibility in this diagnosis,” she says. “I don’t need to hear that.”

Thurston has been on the receiving end of a lot of outreach and opinions since she shared her breast cancer diagnosis—from strangers online, as well as people she knows in real life. While death-related stories are particularly painful, there are plenty of other comments that fall short of helpful. Communication slip-ups in this area are common, experts say. When a loved one is diagnosed with cancer, people often struggle to figure out how to express their support, leading them to trip over their words or hold back from saying anything at all.

More here.

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Things That Fall

They say 420 drones and 24 missiles.
They say most intercepted.
They say two confirmed dead, but you know how the news lies
not by faking it, but by smoothing it.
They don’t say how long the sirens rang,
or if a dog got left on a balcony, or
if the man who always sells sunflowers at the corner
was standing there this time too.

In Lviv there was a girl who liked to draw planets.
Her teacher posted a video,
one of those voiceover ones
where someone says she had dreams,
and she did,
but she also had scabs on both knees and
once stole a pen from the bank just to see if she could.

I drank too much that night.
Watched the footage on mute.
Sometimes I think watching it with sound
makes it feel more real,
but sometimes the silence is worse
you start filling it in.

I don’t know what God wants.
I don’t know what we want.
Maybe it was always going to come to this,
drones over cities, missiles with names,
people saying “our defense was successful”
while putting plastic tarps over windows
where children used to tape paper snowflakes.

My neighbor left his porch light on all night again.
I knocked once but he didn’t answer.
Maybe he’s dead. Maybe he’s sleeping.
Maybe he’s praying in the way only people
who don’t believe in anything can.

There’s a way a city leans after it’s been hit.
Not physically
I mean it like a person who’s just gotten bad news
but hasn’t sat down yet.

One kindergarten’s roof caved in.
One subway station flooded.
One woman lost her hands.
Try writing a poem with no hands.
Try opening a can of peaches.
Try anything.

I used to think words could stop a war.
I used to think language had a kind of backbone.
But now even metaphors feel embarrassed.
Now even hope has to be rationed.

I would send this poem to her
if I thought it could reach her.
If I knew her name.
If I thought the shape of this sentence
could carry what didn’t burn.
But I don’t.
And it can’t.
And even if it could,
the signal wouldn’t hold.
Not with all that smoke in the sky.

by Sushanta Basumatary
from Rattle Magazine

— “The large-scale Russian aerial assault on Ukraine during the night of July 21st, in which over 420 drones and 24 missiles targeted multiple cities including Kyiv and Lviv. Ukrainian air defenses intercepted most of the projectiles, but civilian casualties and infrastructure damage were reported. This event has been described as one of the most intense attacks of the year and has drawn widespread international condemnation.” Sushanta Basumatary:

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Dan Williams at Asterisk:

Many people sense that the United States is undergoing an epistemic crisis, a breakdown in the country’s collective capacity to agree on basic facts, distinguish truth from falsehood, and adhere to norms of rational debate.

This crisis encompasses many things: rampant political lies; misinformation; and conspiracy theories; widespread beliefs in demonstrable falsehoods (“misperceptions”); intense polarization in preferred information sources; and collapsing trust in institutions meant to uphold basic standards of truth and evidence (such as science, universities, professional journalism, and public health agencies).

According to survey data, over 60% of Republicans believe Joe Biden’s presidency was illegitimate. 20% of Americans think vaccines are more dangerous than the diseases they prevent, and 36% think the specific risks of COVID-19 vaccines outweigh their benefits. Only 31% of Americans have at least a “fair amount” of confidence in mainstream media, while a record-high 36% have no trust at all.

What is driving these problems?

More here.

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Christy DeSmith in the Harvard Gazette:

Where did Europe’s distinct Uralic family of languages — which includes Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian — come from? New research puts their origins a lot farther east than many thought.

The analysis, led by a pair of recent graduates with oversight from ancient DNA expert David Reich, integrated genetic data on 180 newly sequenced Siberians with more than 1,000 existing samples covering many continents and about 11,000 years of human history. The results, published this month in the journal Nature, identify the prehistoric progenitors of two important language families, including Uralic, spoken today by more than 25 million people.

The study finds the ancestors of present-day Uralic speakers living about 4,500 years ago in northeastern Siberia, within an area now known as Yakutia.

“Geographically, it’s closer to Alaska or Japan than to Finland,” said co-lead author Alexander Mee-Woong Kim ’13, M.A. ’22.

More here.

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