William Dalrymple in The Guardian:
As a ceasefire brings a measure of peace to the Dresden-like hellscape that Gaza has become, it is time to take stock of all that has been lost. The human cost of what the UN commission of inquiry recognises as a genocide is of course incalculable, but fewer are aware of how much rich history and archaeology has also been destroyed in these horrific months. This is bolstered by the widespread assumption that Gaza was little more than a huge refugee camp built on a recently settled portion of desert. That is quite wrong. In reality Gaza it is one of the oldest urban centres on the planet.
Golda Meir famously declared that “there was no such thing as Palestinians”, but the reality is very different. Palestine is actually one of humanity’s oldest toponyms, and records of a people named after it are as old as literacy itself. Palestine was an established name for the coast between Egypt and Phoenicia since at least the second millennium BCE: the ancient Egyptian texts refer to “Peleset” from about 1450BCE, Assyrians inscriptions to the “Palashtu” c800BCE, and Herodotus c480BCE to “Παλαιστίνη” (Palaistinē). This was all brought home to me as I worked, with my co-presenter Anita Anand, on a 12-part series on Gaza’s history for the Empire podcast.
More here.
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Beatriz Ychussie’s career in mathematics seemed to be going really well. She worked at Roskilde University in Denmark where, in 2015 and 2016 alone, she published four papers on mathematical formulae for quantum particles, heat flow and geometry, and reviewed multiple manuscripts for reputable journals. But a few years later, her run of promising studies dried up. An investigation by the publisher of three of those papers found not only that the work was flawed, but that Ychussie didn’t even exist.
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The trajectory of intelligent life on this planet can be described as an evolution of its verbs: to move, to reproduce, to hunt, to hide, to feel, to make, to use, to think. With the recent rise of artificial intelligence and competent chatbots, many experts have volubly opined about which verbs matter for what counts as “intelligence.” But like artificial insemination, artificial hearts, and artificial reefs, artificial intelligence was designed to interface with biology; its abilities and purpose are inferred exclusively from this interaction.
During the 2018 election, Americans – candidates, parties, PACs, and small donors like you – spent a combined $5 billion pushing their preferred candidates. Although that sounds like a lot of money, Americans spent $12 billion on almonds that same year. Why the imbalance? The oil industry has strong political opinions, and they make $500 billion per year. Do they really think electing oil-friendly politicians isn’t worth 2% of revenue?
We are naturally a highly violent species with a thin veneer of civilization that masks a brutal proclivity for violence – or so many people think. In the seventeenth century, Thomas Hobbes said that human life without government is ‘solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short’. William Golding’s novel, The Lord of the Flies, which helped him win the Nobel Prize for literature in 1983 and many of us read in school, suggests that boys will rapidly descend into mob violence and brutal cruelty without oversight from authority. To know whether this is true, we need to understand the rates of violence among our ancestors.
Ypi, a professor of political theory at the London School of Economics, is a transgressive “Kantian Marxist” (her own descriptor) in a world in which the Right claims a monopoly on transgression. Although she made her career as a serious interpreter of nineteenth-century German philosophy, she has also published widely on Marxism and political parties. Ypi’s last book, Free: Coming of Age at the End of History, released in 2021, held up Hoxha’s Albania as a funhouse mirror, bringing liberalism’s ideological delusions into relief in the process. The book was an international hit: it received near-universal acclaim and was translated into thirty-five languages.
The sculptor Jim Sanborn opened his email account one day last month expecting the usual messages from people claiming to have solved his famous, decades-old puzzle.
Our new research, published in the Journal of Social Psychology, suggests that some people consider it 
Samuel Kaldas’s book is an extremely welcome addition to the growing literature on the Cambridge Platonists. These philosophers have suffered from significant neglect by historians of philosophy, but as a result of the recent interest in lesser known early modern thinkers, this has been changing. Two questions are central to Kaldas’s book: (1) Is the term “Cambridge Platonists” an apt label for the philosophers in question? And (2) What is their significance in the history of philosophy? Contrary to some scholars (19-20), Kaldas convincingly argues that the label is warranted for Henry More, Ralph Cudworth, and the less well-known John Smith and Benjamin Whichcote. They shared a significant commitment to various Platonist ideas, and their contemporary critics sometimes accused them of inappropriately Platonizing tendencies. For Kaldas, their main importance lies in their contribution to the history of the philosophy of religion. He compellingly documents their significance in that context, but as I will explain later, they also have a lot to offer in other areas of philosophy.
The office where Daniel Ksepka was working was overrun with ants. On the wall above the desk were army ants, bull ants, leaf-cutter ants and turtle ants. On a shelf were two honeypot ants that looked as if they had yellow balloons where their stomachs should have been. Kspeka, the curator of science at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Conn., did not call an exterminator. There was no need to: None of the ants in the office were real. The ones on the wall were drawings. The honeypot ants were plastic models made on the museum’s 3-D printer in preparation for an exhibition called “
As time marches on, aging is inevitable. Naturally, a person can accumulate wrinkles, laugh lines, stress, and cellular damage. Of these, damaged cells can take multiple paths: they can undergo programmed death; they can proliferate uncontrollably and become cancer; or they can become senescent cells. They don’t claw their way out of graves, but senescent cells are the body’s biological zombies—damaged, unable to divide, but very much metabolically alive. Instead of dying like normal cells, these “undead” entities can avoid immune system clearance and linger in the brain and other parts of the body. “They are no longer the original cell that they once were,” explained 
Goethe’s philosophical coordinates came initially from Rousseau and Spinoza, two thinkers who appealed to and fortified his own disposition. Rousseau’s concept of amour de soi, the urge for self–preservation, appears in Goethe as the need for individual authenticity. The opposing force, Rousseau’s amour propre, becomes the dead weight of social conventions suppressing whatever is distinctive, original and creative. Hence Goethe’s protagonists are powerful, charismatic personalities who experience society as a ‘prison’, the metaphor used by Werther and Faust. For some, such as Werther, the only way out is death. Others, such as Faust, preserve their essential character, but the struggle to do so leaves victims in its wake. Werther himself, unable to conquer his love for the married Lotte, leaves her and her husband devastated by his suicide. Faust’s egotism inflicts tragedy on his lover Gretchen. Goethe is honest about the cost to others of preserving one’s own authenticity.