Matthew Sims at Aeon Magazine:

During the COVID-19 pandemic, some people took up baking, others decided to get a dog; I chose to grow and observe slime mould. The study in my partner’s flat in Edinburgh became home to two cultures of Physarum polycephalum, an acellular slime mould sometimes more casually referred to as ‘the blob’.

I began a series of experiments investigating how long it would take for two separated cell masses from the same bisected Physarum cell to stop fusing with one another upon reintroduction. Hours turned into days, and days into weeks, and, due to time constraints, the experiment eventually fizzled out around six weeks. This, however, was only the beginning. Over that following year (unbeknown to our unsuspecting neighbours), I conducted several more experiments. Although none of them were published, each inspired new philosophical questions – which to this day continue to shape my thinking. One of the core questions was: what can the behaviour of slime mould teach us about biological memory?

more here.

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Andrew Bustamante at Big Think:

When you accept that other people have secrets, and they will always have secrets, you are preparing yourself for a much more predictable, much more successful future. Because once you accept that reality, you can start applying behaviors, practices into your personal life, into your business life that make it so that you gain more secrets than you share. And gaining secrets in an economy of secrets is the same thing as gaining wealth or gaining power or gaining leverage. You can either live in a world that is not true and believe that people are honest, or you can live in a world that is factual and objective and recognize that all people are keeping secrets from you.

More (including video) here.

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Jeremy Shapiro at Persuasion:

The Thinker just discovered, with a mix of awe and quiet dread, that ChatGPT—a machine—could write his latest policy memo better and faster than he could.

He had asked it, on a whim, to summarize the security implications of EU strategic autonomy. In 10 seconds, it produced 800 words of clear, confident, jargon-laced authority. It had citations, subheadings, even a well-balanced conclusion.

Emboldened, he then asked for a rewrite in the style of the Thinker himself. The result had less clarity, excessive confidence, and an eerie familiarity that made his stomach turn.

The Thinker read it twice. Then a third time. Then he poured himself a drink.

Not bad, he admitted.

In fact, better than not bad. It was credible. Which, in the Thinker’s world, is all anyone really asks for. It broke no new ground, of course, but who did?

More here.

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Megan C. Reynolds at Literary Hub:

I was born in the United States and therefore speak American English, because, aside from a brief few years in my childhood when my father assured me that my first language was Mandarin Chinese (my mother’s native tongue), I was raised in an English-speaking household.

Despite the fact that my sister Jenny and I heard English for most of the year, when we lived with my father, summers spent with my mother in California weren’t multilingual. My mother spoke Chinese as often as she needed to, and in the Bay Area in the mid-nineties, there were plenty of opportunities. She “charmed” the hostesses at various restaurants and used her outside voice on the phone to her family in Taipei. My two younger sisters, Tessa and Shaina (half sisters, if we’re being technical, but I am not) went to Chinese school on the weekends and, at various points in their lives, were sent to live in Taipei with my mother’s family—an ersatz language immersion program, if only because everyone around them spoke Mandarin, so they had to keep up. My sister Jenny and I don’t know enough Mandarin to do anything useful, but I like to tell myself and anyone who is listening that I can sort of understand it.

More here.

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The Where in my Belly

Scientists say my brain and heart
are 73 percent water—
they underestimate me.

A small island—minis, I emerged
among Minnesota’s northern lakes,
the where of maanomin—wild rice in my belly.

I am from boats and canoes and kayaks,
from tribal ghosts who rise at dawn
dance like wisps of fog on water.

My where is White Earth Nation
and white pine forests,
knees summer stained with blueberries,
pink lady slippers open and wild as my feet.

I grew up where math was Canasta,
where we recited times tables
while ice fishing at twenty below,
spent nights whistling to Northern Lights.

I am from old: medicines barks and teas;
from early—the air damp with cedar
the crack of amik, beaver tails on water.

Their echo now a warning to where—
to where fish become a percentage of mercury,
become a poison statistic;
to where copper mines back against
a million blue acres of sacred.

I am from nibi and ogichidaakweg
women warriors and water protectors, from seed
gatherers and song makers.

The wet where pulse in my belly whispers and repeats
like the endless chant of waves on ledgerock
waves on ledgerock on ledgerock on waves
on water. . .nibi

by Kimberly Blaeser
from Split This Rock

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Matthew Wills at JSTOR Daily:

How far back must we go to understand the roots of the long enmity between Iran and the United States? A good place to start is the Iran Hostage Crisis, sparked forty-six years ago after the US ally, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, sought protection and medical care in the US. Iranian revolutionaries took over the US Embassy in Tehran in November 1979 and held sixty-six staffers, demanding the Shah’s return.

The Shah, head of the monarchy, died in Egypt in July 1980, at the age of sixty. Fifty-two of the Embassy hostages were held for 444 days, until January 1981. Relations have generally been abysmal since, reaching another nadir with the US’s recent bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Others go back further still, to the coup that toppled the last democratically elected Iranian government. That was in 1953. Famously, or infamously, the CIA has been given much of the credit for ending the government of Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq. A 2019 NPR piece, for instance, largely reduces complex events to the actions of a single individual, Kermit Roosevelt Jr, the CIA’s man in Tehran (and Teddy Roosevelt’s grandson).

more here.

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Margaret Talbot at The New Yorker:

This past August, in a windowless room of the British Library, in London, Tasha Marks was enacting her own form of time travel. Marks is a scent designer who works with museums, heritage sites, and other cultural spaces to create odors that can open an instant portal to the past. The library had commissioned her to concoct historical smells for an exhibition about the lives of medieval women. On a conference table, Marks placed an array of bottles and fanned out several mouillettes—the paper strips that perfumers use to sample fragrances.

The library would be putting on display a thirteenth-century edition of a remarkable Latin manuscript called “De Ornatu Mulierum,” a compendium of beauty and hygiene advice for women. Marks had obtained ingredients listed in the manuscript to re-create the smell of a breath freshener and of a hair perfume that would have been applied as a powder, like dry shampoo. (“Let her make furrows in her hair and sprinkle on the aforementioned powder, and it will smell marvellously.”) The text didn’t offer exact recipes—no proportions were provided—so there was an element of improvisation, allowing Marks to act as both historian and artist.

more here.

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Mark O’Connell in The Guardian:

Jimmy Donaldson, the 27-year-old online content creator and entrepreneur known as MrBeast, is by any reasonable metric one of the most popular entertainers on the planet. His YouTube channel, to which he posts his increasingly elaborate and expensively produced videos, has 400 million subscribers – more than the population of the United States of America and equivalent to the total number of native English speakers currently alive. It’s close to twice as many subscribers as Elon Musk has X followers, and over 100 million more than Taylor Swift has Instagram followers. And that number, 400 million, does not account for the people who watch MrBeast’s videos in passing, or who are aware of his cultural presence because of their children, or who just sort of know who he is but don’t have any intricate awareness as to why he is famous.

That number is the number of people who have made the volitional move of clicking that subscribe button, to ensure that they will a) not miss his latest videos and b) can be literally counted by potential advertisers as a more-or-less guaranteed audience. One last fact, before we move away from numbers and into more nebulous modes of consideration: his 2024 Amazon Prime reality competition show, Beast Games, in which 1,000 contestants competed for $5m (£3.7m), the largest cash prize in television history, reportedly cost $100m to produce, making it the most expensive unscripted show in history. Jimmy Donaldson, at the risk of belabouring the obvious, is an incredibly big deal.

More here.

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Ethan Mollick at One Useful Thing:

I increasingly find people asking me “does AI damage your brain?” It’s a revealing question. Not because AI causes literal brain damage (it doesn’t) but because the question itself shows how deeply we fear what AI might do to our ability to think. So, in this post, I want to discuss ways of using AI to help, rather than hurt, your mind. But why the obsession over AI damaging our brains?

Part of this is due to misinterpretation of a much-publicized paper out of the MIT Media Lab (with authors from other institutions as well), titled “Your Brain on ChatGPT.” The actual study is much less dramatic than the press coverage. It involved a small group of college students who were assigned to write essays alone, with Google, or with ChatGPT (and no other tools). The students who used ChatGPT were less engaged and remembered less about their essays than the group without AI.

More here.

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Elisa New in the New York Times:

In 1865, the poet Walt Whitman asked:

O what shall I hang on the chamber walls?

And what shall the pictures be that I hang on the walls,

To adorn the burial-house of him I love?

I have always loved these three lines from Whitman’s elegy “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” which he wrote in the spring of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination. I have been thinking about them as we mark the 249th year since the ratification of the Declaration of Independence. The lines distill an essential question that any artist and civic figure who believes American ideals are worth sustaining must ask: How shall we honor, remember and learn from our national past? And how shall we transmit essential values of the past to citizens of the future?

I’ve had Whitman in mind this spring as we’ve watched the Trump administration and its Department of Government Efficiency disassemble the cultural infrastructure of the nation.

More here.

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Andrew Kay in Harper’s Magazine:

“I want y’all to walk to the sign that represents the kind of OCD you most identify with,” announces the moderator, a young woman named Angie Bello who sits cross-legged on the carpet and whose service doodle, Sully, has docked his submarine snout in her lap. Around the room, volunteers hoist placards that say things like violent harm ocd, sexuality ocd, and contamination ocd. They smile benignly, and for an instant all one hundred of us—people ranging from twenty to seventy, joined by nothing but a particular kind of madness—stand frozen, a forest of amygdalas flaring. Outside, San Francisco at dusk: Bob Ross clouds in haphazard sweepings of pink and feathered gray and, darkening beneath them, the city itself, garishly beautiful and troubled.

More here.

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Lynne Peeples in Nature:

George Slavich recalls the final hours he spent with his father. It was a laughter-packed day. His father even broke into the song ‘You Are My Sunshine’ over dinner. “His deep, booming, joyful voice filled the entire restaurant,” says Slavich. “I was semi-mortified, as always, while my daughter relished the serenade.”

Then, about 45 minutes after saying goodbye outside the restaurant, Slavich got a call: his father had died. “I fell to the ground in a puddle of shock and disbelief,” he says. Slavich recognized the mental and emotional trauma he was feeling — and could imagine how it would affect his health. He studies stress for a living, after all. Yet even after he brought up his concerns, his health-care provider didn’t evaluate his stress. “If stress isn’t assessed, then it isn’t addressed,” says Slavich, a clinical psychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “The experience highlighted a paradox between what I know stress is doing to the brain and body, and how little attention it gets in clinical care.”

Decades of research have shown that, although short bursts of stress can be healthy, unrelenting stress contributes to heart disease, cancer, stroke, respiratory disorders, suicide¹ and other leading causes of death. In some cases, prolonged stress drives the onset of a health problem. In others, it accelerates a disease — or induces unhealthy coping behaviours that contribute to chronic conditions².

More here.

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Gaza the Immortal City

I walk through the city of the immortals,

Gary Shteyngart and Jane Ciabattari at Lit Hub:

Vera, the buzzy, brilliant and preternaturally observant ten-year-old central to Gary Shteyngart’s sardonic and profoundly relevant new novel, brings a fresh, necessary perspective to our evolving dystopian universe. Her anxieties as the Russian Jewish-Korean daughter of immigrants surviving in a fraught domestic atmosphere made me pull Shteyngart’s panic-loaded 2014 memoir Little Failure from my bookcase. Yes, there are echoes of the “tightly wound” young Gary, who begins his first unpublished novel in English at ten, in Vera, or Faith. But Vera, in her heart, knows she’s not a failure. And the life of immigrants in 2025 is infinitely more complicated than a decade ago.

Ironically, Vera’s existence may result from a sushi lunch that went sideways. Indeed, Shteyngart wrote Vera, or Faith, in a whirlwind. His editor, David Ebershoff, mentioned that he delivered the novel 51 days after a sushi lunch at which Ebershoff suggested the multigenerational saga Shteyngart had been working on wasn’t working.

more here.

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Jerry Saltz at New York Magazine:

Does anyone write love letters anymore? We send emails. Or worse, texts, emoji. Fast, short, disposable. Once, love letters were slow to make and slower to arrive. They were keepsakes, confessions, feelings made physical. They had form. They were a genre unto themselves: often florid, achingly raw, very private. I’ve written them. Maybe you have, too. Now they’ve all but vanished — and with them, a particular architecture of emotion.

The Frick’s luminous new show, “Vermeer’s Love Letters,” captures the essence of that lost world. Curator Aimee Ng says it’s “a very Frick show,” by which she means there are no gimmicks or didactics, just the art. Three paintings, one room, no men. Each painting features two women — a lady and her servant — as well as a letter either being written or accepted. Only one painting, The Love Letter (on loan from the Rijksmuseum in the Netherlands), is explicitly identified as a billet-doux, but all three are suggestive of interior dramas; secret vulnerabilities and joys; two selves reaching toward one another.

more here.

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Marlene Laruelle in the Politics and Rights Review:

Scholarship on populism has dominated the last two decades but is now retreating in the face of a new concept that seems better equipped to capture the current transformations in our society: that of illiberalism. Illiberalism emerged first in the transition studies field (one may recall Fareed Zakaria’s famous “Illiberal Democracy” article in Foreign Affairs from 1997), as well as in the Asian Studies field, with studies on the rise of East Asian values embodied by Singapore.

It then grew to encompass the Central European democratic backlash, encapsulated by Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, before eventually reaching the study of the well-established Western democracies and their liberal erosion in the 2010s. The move from an adjective, “illiberal,” to a noun, “illiberalism,” reflects both the intellectual thickening of the protest mood against the current social order and, simultaneously, a better conceptualization of it in the scholarship.

The concept of illiberalism indeed provides a far better descriptor than does populism, as the former asserts that we have moved well beyond the stage of a mere protest mood: parts of our constituencies are now ready to experiment with different social orders.

More here.

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