Life After ABBA: One Day in London With Agnetha Fältskog

Jan Gradvall at Literary Hub:

“I know this is considered heresy, but I like it best when it’s ice cold,” says Agnetha Fältskog, then looks around before spooning a couple of large ice cubes into her glass of Chablis.

We’re in the restaurant at the Corinthia hotel in London. It is May 2013. Agnetha will be living here for ten days while promoting her latest solo album A. Every other day she meets with media from all over the world. She has alternate days off, in order to be able to manage her schedule, work out and rest at the hotel spa, or take short walks in the West End and Soho.

What brings Agnetha the most joy on the streets of London isn’t all the trendy shops and people, but children and dogs. Her extensive knowledge of 1960s pop music is also in evidence: “Every time we hear some obscure song on the car radio, or at a restaurant, Agnetha is the one who nails exactly what it is,” says Peter Nordahl, one of her two producers on this album.

More here.

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Nightmares linked to faster biological ageing and early death

Chris Simms at New Scientist:

“People who have more frequent nightmares age faster and die earlier,” says Abidemi Otaiku at Imperial College London.

Along with his colleagues, Otaiku analysed more than 183,000 adults, aged 26 to 86, who had taken part in several studies. At the start, the adults self-reported how often they had nightmares, and were then tracked for as little as 1.5 years to as long as 19 years.

The researchers found that those who reported having nightmares on a weekly basis were more than three times as likely to die before they turned 70 than those who said they never or rarely had nightmares.

There is a clear association, says Otaiku, whose team also found nightmare frequency to be a stronger predictor of premature death than smoking, obesity, poor diet or lack of physical activity.

More here.

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Review of “Against Identity” by Alexander Douglas – a superb critique of contemporary self-obsession

Steven Poole in The Guardian:

Identity is something socially negotiated, both claimed and given. I cannot be French if that nation does not exist; I can’t be a doctor if no one will grant me a medical degree. Social media, however, promises that we can don or doff identities like so many digital masks. We may become persuaded that identities are private goods over which we have rights of ownership and choice, that we can freely select what we “identify as”. The heightened salience of identity in modern political discourse thus represents an unwitting internalisation of the neoliberal view of humans as atomised individuals who navigate life purely by expressing consumer preferences.

The idea that the identity of the speaker should count when assessing his or her argument is what the right used to denounce as “identity politics” (now subsumed under the general concept of “wokeness”), though it is in this way a logical outcome of Thatcherite and Reaganite economics. One strong critique of the critique of identity politics, on the other hand, points out that privileged white males, of the sort who make such complaints, don’t have to worry about their identity because theirs is the default one of power and influence – whereas for various minorities identity might matter much more, not least in how it influences the ways in which privileged white males will treat them.

Philosopher Alexander Douglas’s deeply interesting book diagnoses our malaise, ecumenically, as a universal enslavement to identity.

More here.

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What’s Happening to Reading?

Josh Rothman at The New Yorker:

In January, the economist and blogger Tyler Cowen announced that he’d begun “writing for the AIs.” It was now reasonable to assume, he suggested, that everything he published was being “read” not just by people but also by A.I. systems—and he’d come to regard this second kind of readership as important. “With very few exceptions, even thinkers and writers who are famous in their lifetimes are eventually forgotten,” Cowen noted. But A.I.s might not forget; in fact, if you furnished them with enough of your text, they might extract from it “a model of how you think,” with which future readers could interact. “Your descendants, or maybe future fans, won’t have to page through a lot of dusty old books to get an inkling of your ideas,” Cowen wrote. Around this time, he began posting on his blog about mostly unremarkable periods of his life—ages four to seven, say. His human readers might not care about such posts, but the entries could make it possible “for the advanced A.I.s of the near future to write a very good Tyler Cowen biography.”

Cowen can think this way because large language models, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude, are, among other things, reading machines.

more here.

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Tuesday Poem

future

there are many futures fortune tellers cannot tell,
bombs blitz over skyscrapers in Tehran and Tel Aviv
meanwhile children in Gaza sell their smiles to
cameras, aid workers yell and there is some sort
of nonsense that is discussed under ebony ceilings
under sleek conditions, American president is busy
making ceasefires and fires simultaneously, a lot of
language is berserk, but the Irish bard Heaney said
whatever you say you say nothing and no lyric has
ever stopped a tank,
 on a window Oscar Wilde’s
ghost mesmerizes with wit, and seeks answers in
guffaw and repertory, human tongue is a sentence
with no future lost in the spirals of Yeatsian gyre.

by Rizwan Akhtar

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Dickinson’s Dresses on the Moon

Cori Winrock at the Paris Review:

For over a century there has been just one verifiable photograph of Dickinson. In the iconic black and white silver daguerreotype, she is not wearing the white dress. She’s a teenager fixed in a dress she will live in forever. And that dress is made in an undefinable dark printed fabric with a slight sheen. Not surprising, given dark fabrics were considered more suitable as it kept sitters from becoming spectral blurs—there and not there. But people will mostly forget this first dress. There’s nothing spectacular or singular about it. The daguerreotype era produces millions of replica dark dresses. There’s no narrative we can attach to its common folds. The white fabric arrives in the future.

One hundred years of one documentary photograph and one surviving white dress going round and round, depicting Dickinson as an ethereal-looking teenager superimposed over an ethereally dressed adult. Even as it’s been told round and round that neither her family nor her considered the image a particularly good likeness. Until a second possible daguerreotype is uncovered. In the image there are two women, two dresses.

more here.

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Does a Focus on Royalty Obscure British History?

Levi Roach in History Today:

There can be no doubt that monarchs bulk inordinately large in British history. Whether the subject be Georgian architecture, Victorian literature, or Tudor religious culture, we find ourselves framing discussions in terms of ruling monarchs and dynasties, even when the subject has little to do with them.

The risks of this become particularly acute when we turn to traditional periodisations, which are almost inevitably marked by dynastic change. In 1066 the Norman Conquest and accession of William the Conqueror marks the point of transition between the ‘early’ and ‘central’ Middle Ages, at least where England is concerned. Yet Norman influence did not first arrive on the shores of this Sceptred Isle with the Conqueror’s henchmen. It had been making itself felt for almost a quarter of a century already under Edward the Confessor (r.1042-66), the half-Norman monarch from whom the Conqueror claimed the throne (as Edward’s second cousin). Norman earls, Continental-style castles, and reform-minded French prelates were all to be found aplenty in Edward’s England.

More here.

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How to make America healthy: the real problems — and best fixes

Helen Pearson in Nature:

Since taking over as the top US health official in February, Robert F. Kennedy Jr has overseen radical changes that have alarmed many public-health experts. The agency he leads announced that it would cut its workforce by 20,000, and cancelled billions of dollars in federal funding for research and public health. Earlier this month, Kennedy replaced all the members of an influential vaccine advisory committee with hand-picked ones, including some who have expressed scepticism about vaccines. His mission, he says, is to ‘Make America Healthy Again’. “We are the sickest nation in the world,” he said in March, “and we have the highest rate of chronic disease.”

More here.

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Monday, June 23, 2025

Is Paddy Heneghan Dead?

Liam Heneghan in Emergence Magazine:

1. Before my father’s final illness, I had not understood that when the call goes out to assemble family members dolefully about a deathbed, it’s because a decision has been made to let the loved one pass. The timer is set; the sand is trickling down. Death—that omnipresent possibility at the best of times—becomes calculable when sustenance is withheld. Paddy Heneghan, born in Tralee, Ireland, on 29 March 1927, lived ninety-five years and, though defying predictions by lingering beyond his appointed hour, is now, by all reasonable standards used to determine such matters, dead.

2. During those nights holding vigil at my father’s hospital bedside, I stayed awake counting his breaths. Human breath, or so Aristotle conjectured, supplies the air—the most divine of the elements—needed to form the pneuma zôtikon, the living spirit. I counted as my father’s living spirit—still hitched to his wracked body—was sustained by twelve breaths a minute; seven hundred and twenty ragged breaths an hour. When he breathed a final time—the last of six hundred million by my calculation—I was away. My mother and two siblings were at his side.

More here.

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Martin Schrimpf is crafting bespoke AI models that can induce control over high-level brain activity

Eric James Beyer in Quanta:

First, he and his colleagues test people on tasks related to language or vision. Then they compare the observed behavior or brain activity to results from AI models built to do the same things. Finally, they use the data to fine-tune their models to create increasingly humanlike AI.

The process works best with more data and more models, so Schrimpf built an open-source platform called Brain-Score(opens a new tab) that contains nearly a hundred human neural and behavioral data sets. Researchers have tested thousands of AI models against the human data since Schrimpf first developed the platform in 2017, back when he was still in graduate school.

Schrimpf originally planned to work in the tech industry, but after co-founding a pair of software startups during his early academic career, he felt unfulfilled. “I thought I could ask neuroscientists how the brain works, and that would help me build better AI,” he said. “But I realized there’s a huge opportunity in the opposite direction: prototyping ideas in silico [on a computer] and using AI models to explain the brain.”

More here.

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Late capitalism is an ambiguous term

Corey Robin in the New Left Review:

Lateness may imply death or an ending, as when we speak of my late grandfather or the late afternoon. When the German social theorist Werner Sombart first used the term in the early twentieth century, late capitalism did mean the end of capitalism. Yet ‘late’ in the superlative also suggests up-to-date or state-of-the-art, pointing not to the demise of something but to its refinement and advance. Surveying the same developments as Sombart, the Austrian Marxist Rudolf Hilferding claimed that the emerging economy of the twentieth century was simply ‘the latest phase of capitalist development’, a phrase echoed by Lenin, who took pains to remind his followers that ‘there is no such thing as an absolutely hopeless situation’ for the bourgeoisie.

Despite its popularity in recent years, especially since the 2008 financial crisis and the left-populist insurgencies that followed, late capitalism is not an idea that lends itself to revolution or a vision of progress. It may express a wish to be rid of capitalism. But mostly it works as a theory of turning points that never turn – or worse.

More here.

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The Reenchanted World

Karl Ove Knausgaard at Harper’s Magazine:

At the same time, I came across an interview with a philosopher unknown to me named Gilbert Simondon. In 1958, Simondon had written about an alienation that wasn’t due to technology but due to our lack of knowledge about technology: by treating technology as a mere tool, reducing it to its utility, and denying its inherent dignity and complexity; and by elevating it to mystical status, seeing it as an autonomous threat or an alien entity beyond human understanding.

That was a deeply foreign thought, that it wasn’t technology that was the problem but my relationship to it. What kind of relationship did I have?

About technology, I had never made an independent decision, always just passively going along with the flow of innovations, never immersing myself in anything, always surrendering to the feeling of standing ever further from the world. Not having control, but somehow being controlled—that was the feeling.

more here.

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Artists, Siblings, Visionaries

Tanya Harrod at Literary Review:

As Dorothy Rowe’s classic study My Dearest Enemy, My Dangerous Friend explains, sibling relationships – invariably intense, often fraught – are among the most underexamined of familial connections. Although every sibling strives to create a unique place in the world, inescapably their longest relationships will be with loved, ignored or actively disliked brothers and sisters. 

Gifted siblings with intertwined lives present a fascinating challenge for the biographer. William and Dorothy Wordsworth’s interdependence has been dissected skilfully by Lucy Newlyn; Erika and Klaus Mann were the subject of a brilliant study by Andrea Weiss. Then there is The Knox Brothers, Penelope Fitzgerald’s strange and absorbing book about her father and his three siblings, undoubtedly a work of art which also happens to illuminate four relatively unknown figures. The historian Barbara Caine’s From Bombay to Bloomsbury, a multiple biography of the ten children of Richard and Jane Strachey, is another unexpected triumph, giving as much attention to Richard and Ralph Strachey, two older brothers who were obscure colonial functionaries, as to the younger siblings, the glittering essayist Lytton Strachey and his sister Dorothy, frustrated admirer of André Gide and author of the novel Olivia, a delicate, anonymously published study of schoolgirl lesbian passion.

more here.

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What If the Big Bang Wasn’t the Beginning? Research Suggests It May Have Taken Place Inside a Black Hole

Enrique Gaztanaga in Singularity Hub:

The Big Bang is often described as the explosive birth of the universe—a singular moment when space, time, and matter sprang into existence. But what if this was not the beginning at all? What if our universe emerged from something else—something more familiar and radical at the same time?

In a new paper, published in Physical Review D (full preprint here), my colleagues and I propose a striking alternative. Our calculations suggest the Big Bang was not the start of everything, but rather the outcome of a gravitational crunch or collapse that formed a very massive black hole—followed by a bounce inside it.

More here.

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For Black Women, Life in America Has Always Been a Crossroads

Holly Bass in The New York Times:

There’s a difference between being at a crossroads — weighing an important decision at a crucial moment — and being at the crossroads: a fabled space in the Black diasporic tradition where powers can be granted, whisked away or reclaimed by the spirit world, sometimes for the price of a soul. With her nonfiction debut, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers comfortably inhabits this mythic juncture, telling the stories of Black women in her genealogy with a literary style that joyfully resists easy categorization.

“Misbehaving at the Crossroads” is a matrilineal memoir that reaches back to the 1830s while incorporating slices of social history, political commentary and poetry. Jeffers uses census records and oral histories to excavate the stories of her foremothers, alongside wide-ranging essays on subjects like the 1965 Moynihan report on “The Negro Family,” Roe v. Wade and the election of President Obama. The result is two parallel accounts of the American patriarchal project that, in Jeffers’s words, was designed not to “cover any Indigenous peoples, or white women, or Black folks with the grace of liberty.”

More here.

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Sunday, June 22, 2025