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Gideon Koekoek at Aeon Magazine:

What came first, the chicken or the egg? Perhaps a silly conundrum already solved by Darwinian biology. But nature has supplied us with a real version of this puzzle: black holes. Within these cosmic objects, the extreme warping of spacetime brings past and future together, making it hard to tell what came first. Black holes also blur the distinction between matter and energy, fusing them into a single entity. In this sense, they also warp our everyday intuitions about space, time and causality, making them both chicken and egg at once.

Physicists like me have long since accepted these strange properties of black holes. But I suspect that nature could very well have played a different trick altogether, and made black holes a gateway to something far more unusual – a region where the rules of spacetime themselves transform into something we’ve never seen before. Many objects we think of as black holes may, in fact, be imposters: identical on the outside but harbouring entirely different physics within. Finding out whether that’s true will require peeling back the shell of reality itself. And humankind is getting closer to doing exactly that.

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Shehryar Fazli at the Los Angeles Review of Books:

Scott Anderson begins his latest book, King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution; A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation (2025), with the story of an infamous 1971 party in a desert. The king of Anderson’s title, Iran’s shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, was ostensibly marking 2,500 years of the Persian empire in Persepolis, once the capital under Cyrus the Great, who founded the Achaemenid Empire around 550 BCE. At a time of political stress, the shah was making a bid to link the Pahlavi dynasty, and himself in particular, to Cyrus, as the basis of an unquestionable legitimacy—“his rule and his achievements forming a continuum with those of the ancient immortals,” in Anderson’s words.

By some estimates, the party cost upwards of $600 million, and by all accounts, it was a flop. The images, which you can see in the 2016 BBC documentary Decadence and Downfall: The Shah of Iran’s Ultimate Party, are on a level of ostentation and sheer kitsch that borders on farce.

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Dana Stevens in Slate:

The curiosity that drove the Irish novelist Maggie O’Farrell to write her bestselling 2020 novel Hamnet sprang from the scarcity of documentation about the book’s title character, Hamnet Shakespeare. Born in 1585 to William and Anne Shakespeare, the twin brother to a girl named Judith, Hamnet died of unknown causes in 1596, the only one of the Shakespeares’ three children not to reach adulthood. But for the records of his christening and his burial in the Stratford-upon-Avon parish registers, Hamnet’s 11 years on earth remain a tantalizing blank, one of those countless human existences that are legible to us now only in the form of a bookended pair of dates.

And yet, because Hamnet happened to have a father who spent his life creating characters that four centuries on remain as legible and as vibrant as any have ever been, the six letters of this boy’s name are all that are needed to suggest an infinity of questions. What was the connection between the loss of the dramatist’s only son and the creation, about four years later, of his longest, most linguistically innovative, and—as generations of speculation about its ambiguities attest—philosophically richest play?

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Jake Spring in The Washington Post:

Earl Gray was astonished by what he found when he cut into the laboratory rats. Some had testicles that were malformed, filled with fluid, missing or in the wrong place. Others had shriveled tubes blocking the flow of sperm, while still more were missing glands that help produce semen. For months, Gray and his team had been feeding rats corn oil laced with phthalates, a class of chemical widely used to make plastics soft and pliable. Working for the Environmental Protection Agency in the early 1980s, Gray was evaluating how toxic substances damage the reproductive system and tested dibutyl phthalate after reading some early papers suggesting it posed a risk to human health.

Sitting on a screened porch on a humid summer day more than 40 years later, Gray recalled the study and the grisly birth defects. “It was in enough animals, so we knew it wasn’t random malformations,” said Gray, 80, who retired after nearly 50 years with the agency.

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The Great Watchers

Think of those great watchers of the sky,
the shepherds, the magi, how they looked
for a thousand years and saw there was order,
who learned not only Light would return,
but the moment she’d start her journey.
No writing then. The see-ers gave
what they knew to the song-makers –
the dreamy sons, the daughters who hummed
as they spun, the priestly keepers of story –
and the clever-handed heard, nodded,
and turned poems into New Grange,
Stonehenge, The Great Temple of Karnak

by Nils Peterson

It is an amazing story, to have dropped out of a tree, began walking upright, and looking at things, remembering and learning how to share what was remembered. Nils

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Alan Jacobs at The Hedgehog Review:

The Polish poet Czesław Miłosz (1911–2004) had a complicated Second World War. He was in Warsaw when the Germans invaded, fleeing then to Ukraine. But then, discovering that his wife had been unable to escape Poland, he tried to return to her by way of Romania, then Ukraine again—the Germans were coming from one direction, the Russians from another—then Lithuania. By the summer of 1940, he was back in Warsaw. There, he participated in various underground activities, including the sheltering and transportation of Jews. In 1944, he was captured and briefly held in an internment camp. As the Red Army moved closer to Warsaw and the Nazis burned the city in anticipatory vengeance, Miłosz and his wife, with little more than the clothes on their backs, made their way to a village near Kraków, finding a brief respite from history, though not from poverty.

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Lina Zeldovich at Undark:

A biological phenomenon, microchimerism refers to the presence of a small number of cells from one individual within another genetically distinct individual. It most commonly occurs during pregnancy when fetal cells escape into the mother’s bloodstream or maternal cells sneak into the placenta, eventually becoming part of the embryo or fetus. Likewise, twins may exchange cells before birth, too.

The cases aren’t that rare. “Approximately 8 percent of fraternal twins and 21 percent of fraternal triplets carry blood cells from their companions in utero,” Barnéoud writes, citing a 2020 review. Similarly, fetal cells that wander outside the placenta can persist in the mother’s body for years, genomic scientist Diana Bianchi discovered decades after Mrs. McK’s case, in 1993. Bianchi and her team found male cells in the blood of six women who had given births to sons from one to 27 years earlier. Male cells are easier to spot in women because they have X and Y chromosomes in their cell nucleus while female cells have two X chromosomes, and the Y chromosome stands out. But males can carry foreign cells too.

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Noah Smith at Noahpinion:

Marx, in my opinion, is a woefully underrated thinker on culture. His first book, Ametora — about the history of postwar Japanese men’s fashion — is an absolute classic. His second book, Status and Culture, is a much heavier and more complex tome that wrestles with the question of why people make art; it is also worth a read, although I think there are lots of things it overlooks.

Back in the spring of 2023, I met David in a park in Tokyo. We walked around, and he asked me what book I thought he should write next. I asked him to tell us where internet culture — and by extension, all of culture — should go from here. He replied that if he were going to write a book like that, he would first have to write a cultural history of the 21st century; if we’re going to know where we ought to go, we need to understand where we’ve been.

Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century is that book.

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Masud Husain in The Guardian:

We all know people with very different levels of motivation. Some will go the extra mile in any endeavour. Others just can’t be bothered to put the effort in. We might think of them as lazy – happiest on the sofa, rather than planning their latest project. What’s behind this variation? Most of us would probably attribute it to a mixture of temperament, circumstances, upbringing or even values.

But research in neuroscience and in patients with brain disorders is challenging these assumptions by revealing the brain mechanisms that underlie motivation. When these systems become dysfunctional, people who were once highly motivated can become pathologically apathetic. Whereas previously they might have been curious, highly engaged and productive – at work, in their social lives and in their creative thinking – they can suddenly seem like the opposite.

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Shelly Fan in Singularity Hub:

From restoring movement and speech in people with paralysis to fighting depression, brain implants have fundamentally changed lives. But inserting implants, however small or nimble, requires risky open-brain surgery. Pain, healing time, and potential infections aside, the risk limits the technology to only a handful of people.

Now, scientists at MIT Media Lab and collaborators hope to bring brain implants to the masses. They’ve created a tiny electronic chip powered by near-infrared light that can generate small electrical zaps. After linking with a type of immune cell to form bio-electronic hybrid chips, a single injection into the veins of mice shuttled the devices into their brains—no surgery required. It sounds like science fiction, but the injected chips easily navigated the brain’s delicate and elaborate vessels to zero in on an inflamed site, where the microchip reliably delivered electrical pulses on demand. The chips happily cohabitated with surrounding neurons without changing the cells’ health or behavior.

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Marigold Warner in Lensculture:

When Alastair Philip Wiper first picked up a camera in 2007, he never thought it would lead him to photographing the world’s largest nuclear research facility, a medicinal cannabis farm, and a sausage factory. In fact, he never thought he would end up as a photographer at all. Wiper was six years out of a degree in philosophy and politics when he began making images. After stints of cheffing and travelling the world, he eventually settled in Copenhagen and got a job as a graphic designer for a clothing brand. They needed a photographer to shoot some lookbooks, so he volunteered.

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Makenna Goodman in The New York Times:

Several years ago, I stopped going to therapy. I no longer trusted myself to tell the story of my life in a way that felt forward-moving. I harbored a suspicion that the therapist held some knowledge of me that she would one day reveal — like whether I should switch careers or move — but she never did.

I’ve always wanted to believe in a magic that transcends the human-constructed world, a universe that sees me, that can hold me when I fail to hold myself. But then again, it’s possible that wanting to believe in magic is a projection of my own laziness, my desire to cheat the system, to skip the hard work of living and summon the answer.

Instead of therapy at $100 a week (I was on the low end of a sliding scale), I invested in an astrological session every few months; at about $200 a session, I saved roughly $3,000 a year. With the astrologer, I didn’t talk much at all, and I wasn’t allowed to give a back story, which made the shocks of recognition that much more delightful when she got the details of my life right.

It was a relief to have someone talk about me in new, abstract terms. I surrendered to information that felt larger than my construction of self. If my sense of foreboding darkness could be explained cosmically, it didn’t have to feel so personal. This gave me the pleasureful illusion of control, and a confirmation of some deeper intuition. It felt like a companion; I wasn’t alone in my experience. It took away the sting of individualized humiliation, of being lost.

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The Problem with Gratitude

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Kristin Collier at Literary Hub:

In a 2013 paper in Social Science & Medicine, researchers studied debt’s impact on general health outcomes—the first study of its kind, they noted. Earlier scholarship traced the impacts of socioeconomic status on health and the impact of debt on mental health, but before this study, no one had drawn a clear, thick arrow between debt and a body. Because of Americans’ rapid accumulation of debt since the 1980s—including medical, credit card, student loan, payday, and mortgage debt—more people are experiencing indebtedness than ever before, and it’s hurting them. It’s hurting us. The study, which focused on young adults between the ages of twenty-four and thirty-two with personal debt, found that debt is “a significant predictor of health outcomes.”

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Mark Louie Ramos in The Conversation:

As a statistician involved in research for many years, I know the care that goes into designing a good study capable of coming up with meaningful results. Understanding what the results of a particular study are and are not saying can help you sift through what you see in the news or on social media.

Let me walk you through the scientific process, from investigation to publication. The research results you hear about crucially depend on the way scientists formulate the questions they’re investigating.

Researchers in all kinds of fields use the scientific method to investigate the questions they’re interested in.

First, a scientist formulates a new claim – what’s called a hypothesis. For example, is having some genetic mutations in BRCA genes related to a higher risk of breast cancer? Then they gather data relevant to the hypothesis and decide, based on the data, whether that initial claim was correct or not.

It’s intuitive to think that this decision is cleanly dichotomous – that the researcher decides the hypothesis is either true or false. But of course, just because you decide something doesn’t mean you’re right.

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